/ˈkɒnsɪkreɪt/
[verb] To make something officially holy or sacred through a special ceremony or ritual. It can also mean to formally dedicate something or someone to an important purpose.
Every time a priest blesses bread and wine, they are unknowingly invoking the same Latin root that gave us the word 'sacred.'
The word 'consecrate' travels to us from Latin in a remarkably direct line. Its source is the Latin verb 'consecrare', which meant 'to make sacred' or 'to dedicate to the gods.' This verb was itself built from two parts: the prefix 'con-', meaning 'together' or used here to intensify the action, and 'sacrare', meaning 'to make holy.' That core element 'sacrare' came from 'sacer', the Latin adjective for 'sacred' or 'holy' — a word the Romans used for anything set apart and dedicated to the divine. The Latin 'consecrare' → Late Latin 'consecratus' → Old French 'consecrer' → Middle English 'consecrate' is the clean, unbroken path this word walked into our language.
The Romans used 'consecrare' with great seriousness. It described the act of formally dedicating a temple, an altar, or even a person to the gods. When a Roman emperor was deified after death — declared a god by the Senate — the act was called 'consecratio.' This was not mere ceremony. To consecrate something in the Roman world was to remove it from ordinary human use and place it under divine ownership. Touching or misusing a consecrated object was considered not just rude but deeply dangerous.
By the time the word arrived in English in the 14th century, it had passed through the filters of Christian theology, where it took on an even more specific and powerful meaning. In Christian practice, 'consecrate' came to describe the central moment of the Mass — the point at which a priest transforms ordinary bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. This meaning was so dominant in medieval English that for centuries, the word carried an almost exclusively religious weight. You consecrated a bishop, a church, or the Eucharist — not a business deal or a sports ground.
Over time, the meaning gently expanded. By the 17th and 18th centuries, writers began using 'consecrate' in a broader, more poetic sense — to dedicate something to a noble cause or to mark it as especially important. Abraham Lincoln famously approached this secular usage in his Gettysburg Address of 1863, saying 'we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground' — placing the word in a context that was both patriotic and deeply spiritual at once. This kind of language shows how 'consecrate' had grown rich enough to carry both religious and civic meaning simultaneously.
The Latin root 'sacer' at the heart of this word has been extraordinarily productive in English. Through different paths, it gave us 'sacred' directly from Latin 'sacer', 'saint' via Latin 'sanctus' (a related form meaning 'made holy') → Old French 'saint' → Middle English 'saint', and 'sacrilege' from Latin 'sacrilegium' (stealing sacred things) → Old French 'sacrilege' → Middle English 'sacrilege'. Even the word 'sacrifice' follows a parallel route: Latin 'sacrificium' (from 'sacer' plus 'facere', to make) → Old French 'sacrifice' → Middle English 'sacrifice'. All of these words carry the same ancient idea — that some things are set apart, touched by the divine, and belong to a different order than the everyday world.