tomb
/tuːm
/noun
1A large vault, typically an underground one, for burying the dead.It is England's oldest borough; Athelstan, the first king of England was initially buried here and his tomb remains in the abbey....
- This is the town where Padro Pio spent most of his life and is buried in the tomb in the friary.
- The shrine was once a beautiful golden palace but the years had worn away its natural beauty and now only some walls, statues and the underground tombs remained.
Synonyms
burial chamber, burial place, sepulchre, mausoleum, vault, crypt, undercroft, catacomb, pyramid, charnel house, shrine, ossuary, reliquary;
last/final resting place, grave, barrow, burial mound, burial pit;
monument, memorial, cenotaph, marker;
Archaeology mastaba
rare feretory
1.1An enclosure for a corpse cut in the earth or in rock.Our junket included stops at the ruins of a Roman coliseum, a sulfur mud bath, and some ancient Lycean rock tombs - all sites inaccessible by car or bus....
- It resembles the rock cut chambered tombs of the Mediterranean, though it is probably of local inspiration.
- In 1923 Sir Flinders Petrie found another cache of fossils at Qua, wrapped in linen and carefully stored in rock tombs.
1.2A monument to the memory of a dead person, erected over their burial place.Her son Henry erected a tomb over her grave at Fontevraud....
- In Egypt pyramids were used as monumental tombs, whereas in Mesopotamia, Mesoamerica, and South America they were temple platforms.
- Abera is now a worthy successor to his great predecessor, whose premature death in 1973 is marked by a monumental tomb in Addis Ababa.
1.3 (the tomb) literary Death: none escape the tomb
Origin
Middle English: from Old French tombe, from late Latin tumba, from Greek tumbos.