Etymology

castellite

Cas·tel·lite
C3A1S1T1E1L1L1I1T1E1

Today it means: A religious group in western North Carolina during the late 19th century. Mormon missionaries encountered them and found that they were enemies, not converts. Full definition →

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castellite · noun1

From Castelli + -ite, from the surname of its discoverer, Herr Bergverwalter Castelli.

Castellite · noun2

Possibly from a very brief 19th-century Mormon settlement in Castell, Texas, which, like all Mormon communities, sent out missionaries. Identifying "Utah" as the source of the Castellite missionaries in the quote below may have been based on the common contemporaneous assumption that all Mormons were based in Utah.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.