Meaning & use
hermit
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Meanings
nouncountablereligion
Someone who chooses to live alone, away from other people, often for spiritual reasons.
Grammar: A person noun: a hermit lives in a cave.
Patterns
- live like a hermit
- a hermit in the mountains
A hermit lived in a stone hut high above the village.
The monk became a hermit and spent twenty years in silence.
Legends told of a hermit who healed travelers.
nouncountableinformalhumorous
A person who avoids social contact and prefers to stay at home on their own.
Grammar: Informal and often teasing: you've become a hermit.
Patterns
- turn into a hermit
- become a hermit
After the move, he turned into a hermit and rarely left his apartment.
My cousin is a total hermit on weekends.
I felt like a hermit after working from home for months.
nouncountablebiologyinformal
A hermit crab, a small crab that lives inside an empty shell.
Grammar: Short for hermit crab, mostly in conversation about animals.
Patterns
- a hermit in a shell
The child watched a hermit scuttle across the rock pool.
A hermit swaps shells when it outgrows one.
We found a tiny hermit hiding in a spiral shell.
Word forms
| plural | hermits |
|---|
Common combinations
- live like a hermit
- Since his retirement he lives like a hermit in the hills.
- become a hermit
- She threatened to become a hermit and move to the woods.
- hermit crab
- The hermit crab dragged its borrowed shell along the sand.
- hermit kingdom
- The country was long described as a hermit kingdom.
- reclusive hermit
- The reclusive hermit shunned all visitors.
Synonyms and how they differ
- recluse
- Recluse describes someone who avoids society, but need not have a religious or wilderness life, unlike the classic hermit.
- loner
- Loner is informal and describes a personality that prefers being alone, not a life apart.
- anchorite
- Anchorite is a formal religious term for someone who withdraws for spiritual devotion, narrower than hermit.
- solitary
- Used as a noun, solitary is rare and literary, while hermit is the everyday word.
Opposites
Word family
Commonly confused: hermit or heretic?
hermit vs heretic
A heretic holds beliefs against accepted religion, whereas a hermit lives alone; the words sound a little alike.
Practice
After the argument, he moved to a cabin in the forest and lived as a ___, seeing nobody for months.
Choose one answer.
A hermit lives apart from others. A pilgrim travels to a holy place, so it does not fit someone staying alone in a cabin.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “hermit”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.