sexton

plural sextons

1. A church official who looks after a church building and its graveyard and may act as a gravedigger and bell ringer.

   The whole village poured out to gaze on these Asiatic princes, for such the old sexton, who had in his youth been at Moscow and Constantinople, said they were.

   1828, Thomas Keightley, The Fairy Mythology, volume I, London: William Harrison Ainsworth, page 312

   2 more examples

   on that same night, Mr Haredale, having strongly bound his prisoner, with the assistance of the sexton, and forced him to mount his horse, conducted him to Chigwell

   1841 February–November, Charles Dickens, “Barnaby Rudge. Chapter 61.”, in Master Humphrey’s Clock, volume III, London: Chapman & Hall, […], →OCLC

   We stopped in the road and watched the sexton shovelling in the new earth. A peasant with a black beard and high leather boots stood beside the grave. The sexton stopped shovelling and straightened his back. The peasant in the high boots took the spade from the sexton and went on filling in the grave

   1927, Men Without Women, Ernest Hemingway, An Alpine Idyll

   Synonyms: sacristan

2. A sexton beetle.

plural Sextons · alternative Sexson

1. A surname originating as an occupation.