temporal

comparative more temporal · superlative most temporal

1. not comparablerelationalusuallyOf or relating to the material world, as opposed to sacred or clerical.

   temporal power, temporal courts

   3 more examples

   The Right Honourable the Lords Spiritual and Temporal of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in Parliament assembled

   The [papal] train was in use until 1871, when the Pope [Pius IX] lost his temporal power.

   1945 September and October, C. Hamilton Ellis, “Royal Trains—V”, in Railway Magazine, page 252

   Not long before, he had ruefully acknowledged in a letter to his pious mother that most of his appointments to the bench of bishops had been motivated by distinctly temporal impulses.

   2011, Thomas Penn, Winter King: The Dawn of Tudor England, Penguin Books, page 166

   Synonyms: secular, lay, civil, worldly, areligious, civil, earthly, irreligious · Antonyms: spiritual, ecclesiastical

2. Relating to time:
   1. not comparablerelationalusuallyOf limited time, transient, passing, not perpetual, as opposed to eternal.

      The things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal.

      1611, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], →OCLC, 2 Corinthians 4:18

   2. euphemisticnot comparablerelationalusuallyLasting for a short time only.
   3. not comparablerelationalusuallyOf or relating to time as distinguished from space.
   4. not comparablerelationalusuallyOf or relating to the sequence of time or to a particular time.

      Synonyms: chronological

   5. not comparablerelationalusuallygrammarRelating to or denoting time or tense.

plural temporals

1. in pluralAnything temporal or secular; a temporality.

   for God's people love always to be dealing as well in temporals as spirituals

   1684, John Dryden, The History of the League, translation of Histoire de la Ligue by Louis Maimbourg

   1 more example

   He assigns supremacy to the pope in spirituals, and to the emperor in temporals.

   1876, James Russell Lowell, “Dante”, in Among My Books. Second Series., Boston, Mass.: James R[ipley] Osgood and Company, late Ticknor & Fields, and Fields, Osgood, & Co., →OCLC, page 30

1. not comparablerelationalanatomyOf or situated in the temples of the head or the sides of the skull behind the orbits.

plural temporals

1. abbreviationellipsisanatomyEllipsis of temporal bone.
2. biologyAny of a reptile's scales on the side of the head between the parietal and supralabial scales, and behind the postocular scales.