The difference between a cemetery and a graveyard

(WYTV) – Where would you like to spend eternity? In a cemetery or a graveyard?
Is there a difference?

We bury the dead in both places and the words are often interchangeable, but not quite.

The older word is “cemetery.” It comes from Latin and we first used it in the 1400s. It first meant underground catacombs, and by 1485, it referred to a churchyard — a word that’s now obsolete.

A churchyard was a burial site on church property. Since the 1600s, a cemetery has meant a large, open space where we can bury lots of people.

So what’s a graveyard?

“Graveyard” is a newer word, and it simply meant a burial ground but a not very large one — smaller than a cemetery and usually on church property.

We tend to use the word graveyard as a metaphor.

We might call an auto scrapyard a graveyard of cars, not a cemetery of cars. Europe is the graveyard of Empires, and we work the graveyard shift.

That phrase, graveyard shift, is a somewhat spooky term for a job or part of a job typically done overnight. We first saw it in a 1907 issue of Collier’s magazine.

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