Crossword clue
Secular crossword clue
7 words in our dictionary can answer the crossword clue "secular", from 3 letters up to 9, grouped below by the length of your slot.
Written by Blake Boege
Answers by length
6 different lengths answer this one. Yours is whichever row matches the squares in the grid.
| Letters | Answers |
|---|---|
| 3 |
|
| 4 |
|
| 6 |
|
| 7 |
|
| 8 |
|
| 9 |
|
What this list looks like
The short ones are worth learning: LAY at 3 letters, which is where a setter goes when the grid is tight.
Which one does the setter mean?
Three squares is LAY. It is the ordinary word for someone outside the clergy, and it is the shortest answer this clue has. Four squares is LAIC, which means the same and exists mostly to fill grids.
How these differ
LAY, LAIC, LAYMAN and LAYPERSON all describe someone who is not ordained, and say nothing about belief: a lay reader is a churchgoer. WORLDLY and TEMPORAL contrast with spiritual rather than with clerical, which is why TEMPORAL powers are the ones a state holds. PROFANE is the strongest word here and the most easily misread. Its older sense is simply outside the temple, as in profane music, and it only means blasphemous in the newer one.
Still stuck? Filter by the letters you have
Got a crossing letter? The word finder searches the same dictionary as this page, with a box for the first letter, the last, and anything in between.
Where these answers come from
No puzzle was consulted to build this page. Every word above is recorded by WordNet as meaning “secular” or as naming a kind of it, and each one is in the 173,000-wordlist this site searches. Moby Thesaurus lists 6 of them too. We hold no newspaper's answer key and reproduce no published crossword.
Common questions
- What is the answer to the crossword clue "secular"?
- There is more than one. 7 words in our dictionary fit this clue, and which one a puzzle wants depends on the length of the slot and the crossing letters. Three squares is LAY. It is the ordinary word for someone outside the clergy, and it is the shortest answer this clue has. Four squares is LAIC, which means the same and exists mostly to fill grids.
- How many letters is the answer to "secular"?
- Anything from 3 to 9. The length with the most candidates is 7. Count the squares in your grid and read only that row of the table.
- How reliable are these answers?
- 6 of the 7 appear in two independently compiled reference works, WordNet and Moby Thesaurus, rather than one. All of them are in the 173,000-word dictionary this site searches. None of them comes from any published puzzle.