Forms: 7 cerment, 9 cerement, cearment, searment. [a. F. cirement ‘a waxing, a searing; a dressing, closing, covering, or mingling with wax’ (Cotgr.), f. cirer to wax: cf. also CERE v. in sense 2, to wrap (a corpse) in a waxed cloth or shroud. Always concretely in Eng.: cf. covering, wrap, wrapping, shroud, and similar vbl. sbs. (Sometimes erroneously pronounced se·rĭ- after ceremony.)]
Almost always in pl.: Waxed wrappings for the dead; loosely, grave-clothes generally. Rarely in sing. = cerecloth; winding-sheet, shroud. (App. caught up by modern writers from Shakespeare, and used in the same loose rhetorical way as urn, ashes, etc.)
1602. Shaks., Ham., I. iv. 48. Tell Why thy Canoniz’d bones Hearsed in death, Haue burst their cerments.
1820. Scott, Ivanhoe, xliii. The ghost of Athelstane himself would burst his bloody cerements. Ibid. (1825), Talism., iv. Like a voice proceeding from the cearments of a corpse.
a. 1845. Hood, Bridge Sighs, 10. Look at her garments Clinging like cerements.
1836. Mrs. Browning, Poet’s Vow. Nor wore the dead a stiller face Beneath the cerement’s roll.
1856. Capern, Poems, 144. In her cerements enfolded Pale and beautiful she slept.
attrib. 1877. Amelia B. Edwards, Up Nile, iv. 76. Shreds of cerement cloths.
b. fig. (Chiefly in reference to ‘bursting cerements’ or similar notions.)
1804. W. Austin, Lett. fr. London, 87. Matthew Prior is the only Englishman that I recollect, who ever burst the cearments of servitude, and rose to eminence.
1821. Byron, Two Fosc., III. i. 81. Just men’s groans Will burst all cerement, even a living grave’s.
1879. Farrar, St. Paul, I. 5. The man who loosed Christianity from the cerements of Judaism.
2. The action of ‘cering’ a dead body or its covering; the wax used. rare.
1868. Stanley, Westm. Abb., iii. 142. The renewal of the cerement ceased. (Cf. CERECLOTH 1, 1868.)
3. Waxy coating generally. rare.
1860. All Y. Round, No. 47. 493. The very lips seemed stiff with cerement, and the skins that were not hard red, were of a ghastly cosmeticised whiteness.
Hence Cerement v., to wrap in cerements.
1858. Sat. Rev., V. 308/1. Ceremented in inodorous fallacies.
