lustration.

1. A religious ceremony performed to cleanse people, places, or objects of ritual impurity.

2. An act or process of cleansing understood in moral or spiritual terms.

3. An act of washing or physically cleansing oneself or something else.

Use it for

Words that belong together

• ritual lustration
• lustration with water
• ceremony of lustration

On the page

Before the burial, the household underwent a lustration with water and smoke.

Usage notes

Primary category: horror / gothic literary. Lexical Type: Word. Forms: Countable or uncountable by context; countable singular lustration; plural lustrations. Commonness: uncommon (editorial estimate; not a corpus frequency statistic). Legacy lexical fields mirror sense 1; numbered fields keep each relevant meaning separate. Research distinction: Purificatory ceremony for people/places; moral or spiritual cleansing; physical washing. Archaic inspection-tour use also recorded; broader contemporary scope not fully verified. Individual writer usefulness checked for a distinct physical, ritual, facial or acoustic function. Definitions/examples are original; genre suitability is not an inherent emotional rating. Writing functions: precise physical or ritual description, gothic scene construction.