charnel

1. 1.

   a vault or building where corpses or bones are deposited

   Synonymscharnel house

   Broadervault

1. 1.

   gruesomely indicative of death or the dead

   “a charnel smell came from the chest filled with dead men's bones”

   “ghastly shrieks”

   “the sepulchral darkness of the catacombs”

   Synonymsghastlysepulchral

   Similaroffensive

Other forms of charnel

plural

charnels·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about charnel

What does charnel mean?

charnel means "a vault or building where corpses or bones are deposited". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in charnel?

charnel has 2 syllables: char-nel. The stress falls on "char".

What is another word for charnel?

Close synonyms include charnel house, ghastly, sepulchral. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is charnel a common word?

charnel is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.