Church comes (via Old English cirice and West Germanic kirika) from Greek kuriakē, meaning "of the lord". Possibly a shortening of kuriakē oikia ("house of the Lord") or ekklēsia kuriakē ("congregation of the Lord").
Temple comes from the Latin templum ("cut off"), referring to a sacred region set aside from normal space.
Mosque seems to come to English via a long chain of other languages, but is ultimately derived from the Arabic masjid, a place of prostration.
Synagogue comes from the Greek, and means either "assembly" or "learning together".
So it looks like temple is a pretty reasonable single word for a building set aside for worship. But then there's the complication, in Judaism, of "the Temple" referring one particular building, and many Jews not wanting to use that word to refer to other Jewish worship-houses.
On the other hand, the notion that we should have a single, simple word for all houses of religious worship (setting them aside from buildings used for purposes that we don't consider worship) assumes that our culture has a firm grasp of the distinction between the religious and the non-religious. I don't think that assumption is actually true.
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zvi and
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Date: 2011-05-17 09:34 pm (UTC)Looking up etymologies online...
So it looks like temple is a pretty reasonable single word for a building set aside for worship. But then there's the complication, in Judaism, of "the Temple" referring one particular building, and many Jews not wanting to use that word to refer to other Jewish worship-houses.
On the other hand, the notion that we should have a single, simple word for all houses of religious worship (setting them aside from buildings used for purposes that we don't consider worship) assumes that our culture has a firm grasp of the distinction between the religious and the non-religious. I don't think that assumption is actually true.