Crossword clues for pallbearer
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
The Collaborative International Dictionary
pallbearer \pall"bear*er\ (p[add]l"b[^a]r*[~e]r), n. One of those who attend the coffin at a funeral; -- so called from the pall being formerly carried by them.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
Wiktionary
n. 1 (context archaic English) One who carries a corner of the pall over a coffin or casket. 2 One called upon to carry or bear the casket at a funeral.
WordNet
n. one of the mourners carrying the coffin at a funeral [syn: bearer]
Wikipedia
A pallbearer is one of several participants who helps carry the casket at a funeral. A pall is the heavy cloth that is draped over a coffin. The term "pallbearer" is used to signify someone who bears the coffin which the pall covers.
Some traditions distinguish between the roles of pallbearer and casket bearer. The former is a ceremonial position, carrying a tip of the pall or a cord attached to it. The latter do the actual heavy lifting and carrying. There may otherwise be only pallbearers in the literal sense while the casket is on an animal or vehicle.
In Western cultures, the pallbearers are usually male family members, close friends, or colleagues of the deceased. A notable exception was the funeral of Lee Harvey Oswald, in which reporters outnumbered the mourners and were pressed into service to carry the coffin. In some Asian cultures, pallbearers are not to be members of the family but are outsiders, given a tip to perform the services of pallbearer.
A pallbearer in Canada and the USA will sometimes carry a casket by the handles, and at around waist height, and on shoulders of pallbearers but there is no standard method as witnessed by image searches for North American pallbearer methods.
In the United Kingdom, Australia, and Ireland, the casket is often carried on the shoulders, and the handles are for the most part decorative. All lifting should be done from underneath the casket as demonstrated in reference #8.
Pallbearer is an American doom metal band from Little Rock, Arkansas, United States, formed in 2008.
Usage examples of "pallbearer".
Presently the policemen returned from the Cowgate with a motley assortment of pallbearers.
Teska and the two pallbearers also stood patiently beside the solar transporter, but the same could not be said of the numerologist, Mother Fergolin.
At last the pallbearers brought the casket outside for the funeral photograph.
Arthur and the other pallbearers were only faces set in the windows of the hearse.
Episcopal Church, with pomp and ceremony, and her pallbearers were the husbands of her friends.
Aulus led the senatorial pallbearers carrying the body of Claudius in solemn procession down to a Forum crowded with Romans.
Aulus and the pallbearers carefully hoisted the bier onto the apex of the pyre.
Echoing memories of computer crashes, pallbearer squirrels, a strange man warning her to take the box home, and a stranger woman crouched by the door blurred her vision.
Longarm had managed to crawfish out of being a pallbearer, with hardly a chance in the world if some sore loser threw down on him while he was helping to carry the coffin.
Later, one of the pallbearers told Ellen Cherry that Verlin had been watching a Washington Redskins exhibition game when he stood and clutched his chest.
The finished piece was handed down the line from one to another, each pallbearer stepping back and saluting as he or she finished.
There was the minister who didn't look quite like Reverend Schreiber who'd been pastor of the Ransomville Lutheran Church for decades, and therc were the pallbearers, four men, must be Hausmann relatives but Marianne could recognize only the youngest, a cousin of her mother's now bald and stoop-shouldered.
He's always asking people why the Frenchman crossed the road or how many Polacks it takes to screw in a lightbulb or how many pallbearers there are at a Harlem funeral.