sepulchre

Etymology

From Middle English sepulcre and Old French sepulcre, from Latin sepulcrum (“grave, burial place”).

noun

1. A burial chamber.
   Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness. 1611, King James Version, Matthew 23:27
   [I]n the reign of Henry the Second, a body happening, by chance, to be dug up near Glastonbury Abbey, without any symptoms of putrefaction or decay, the Welch, the descendants of the Ancient Britons, tenacious of the dignity and reputation of that illustrious hero King Arthur], vainly supposed it could be no other than the body of their justly-boasted Pen-Dragon; and that he had been immured in that sepulchre by the spells of some powerful and implacable inchanter. 1810, J[ohn] Stagg, “Arthur’s Cave. A Legendary Tale.”, in The Minstrel of the North: Or, Cumbrian Legends.[…], London: Printed by Hamblin and Seyfang,[…], for the author, and sold by J. Blacklock,[…], →OCLC, page 105
   And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the sideOf my darling—my darling—my life and my bride,In her sepulchre there by the sea— In her tomb by the sounding sea. 1849, Edgar Allan Poe, "Annabel Lee"
   Plato, too, it is well known, considered the body as the sepulchre of the soul, and in the Cratylus concurs with the doctrine of Orpheus, that the soul is punished through its union with body. 1891, Thomas Taylor, The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries, Section 1
   The aged sisters draw us into life: we wail, batten, sport, clip, clasp, sunder, dwindle, die: over us dead they bend. First, saved from waters of old Nile, among bulrushes, a bed of fasciated wattles: at last the cavity of a mountain, an occulted sepulchre amid the conclamation of the hillcat and the ossifrage. 1922, James Joyce, Ulysses, Part II, Chapter 14
2. (Christianity, historical) A recess in some early churches in which the reserved sacrament, etc. was kept from Good Friday till Easter.

verb

1. (transitive) To place in a sepulchre.
   And so sepulchred in such pomp dost lie That kings for such a tomb would wish to die. 1630, John Milton, On Shakespeare