Sanctuary | Vocabulary | Khan Academy

It's all going to be okay, wordsmiths. We're approaching a sanctuary. This is a peaceful video about a peaceful word.

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Sanct. It's a noun. It means a place to hide and be safe; a place of protection for humans or animals. Maybe you've heard of an elephant sanctuary or a whale sanctuary? These are protected places for those animals to live safely.

I love the components of this word. It's from Latin, and we can break it down into parts. Sanct comes from the Latin "Sanctus," meaning holy. A sanctuary is literally a holy place, like a room intended for worship, but its meaning has expanded beyond just that use.

An "ary" is a piece of Latin that makes nouns. It means a place for or a person for. So, a sanctuary is a place for holiness, a church, classically where you could hide out from the law. That was sanctuary.

What words can you think of that contain either of these elements, "sanct" or "ary"? I'll give you 10 seconds of very chill, pleasant music, and meet you back here.

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Okay, let's go. Here are three words I thought of: library, right? A place for books. Sanctify, to make something holy, to bless it. I just took that suffix that makes verbs -ify and attached it to sanct, right? Holy making.

And sanction, which is a kind of official decree. It used to be specifically a church decree, but now it can be used in a variety of ways. It might mean that something is officially approved, like a school-sanctioned event, or it might mean a penalty for breaking a law or a rule, like sanctions against a company for doing something illegal.

Let's use "sanctuary" in a sentence or two. Here we can see it as a literal safe place. Jean Baptist realized that the shipwreck had become an artificial reef, a sanctuary for eels and seahorses. The sea creatures live there; they're protected there. It's their habitat.

But we can also use the word in a more figurative sense. Anam Maria saw the library as her sanctuary. She could wall herself up with books and block out the rest of the world. Anna Maria doesn't live in the library; it's a place where she feels safe. She can make a little book fortress and, in so doing, feel protected.

I hope that you can find a sanctuary in the things you love, wordsmiths, whether it's books or eels or shipwrecks. I think those are the three options, right? You can learn anything.

Daveid out.