Forms: 3 æremite, 3–7 heremite, -yte, 5 herimyte, 3– eremite. [ad. late L. erēmīta (med.L. herēmīta, ad. eccl. Gr. ἐρημίτης, f. ἐρημία a desert, f. ἐρῆμος uninhabited. In OF. the regular phonetic descendant of late L. (h)erēmīta was (h)ermite with loss of the middle syllable (see HERMIT); but the L. word was also adapted in OF. as (h)eremite, and this was taken into ME. Originally h)eremite and h)ermit(e, HERMIT, were employed indiscriminately; but from about the middle of the 17th c. they have been differentiated in use, hermit being the ordinary and popular word, while eremite (always spelt without the unetymological h) is used either poet. or rhetorically, or with special reference to its primitive use in Gr.]
1. One who has retired into solitude from religious motives; a recluse, hermit.
Said esp. of the Christian solitaries from the 3rd cent. onwards, as distinguished from the cœnobites, who, though withdrawn from the world, lived as members of a community.
c. 1200. Trin. Coll. Hom., 85. Seint iohan baptist þe on his childhode bicom eremite.
c. 1205. Lay., 18804. Þene æremite [1275 heremite] he iseh come.
a. 1340. Hampole, Psalter ci. 7. Heremytis … þat flees þe felaghshipe of men.
1387. Trevisa, Higden (Rolls), V. 87. Paule þe firste heremyte.
1486. Bk. St. Albans, F. vij a. An Obseruans of herimytis.
1586. J. Hooker, Girald. Irel., in Holinshed (1808), VI. 113. A Satyre in the wildernesse did talke with Antonie the heremite.
1667. Milton, P. L., III. 474. Embryo’s and Idiots, Eremits and Friers.
1764. Maclaine, trans. Mosheim’s Eccl. Hist., iii. § 15. The Eremites … seem to have deserved no other reproach than that of a delirious and extravagant fanaticism.
1812. Byron, Ch. Har., I. iv. His native land … seemed to him more lone than Eremite’s sad cell.
1874. H. R. Reynolds, John Bapt., viii. 508. The law of the eremite and the cœnobite corresponds with the transitory dispensation of John.
b. transf. (By Milton used with allusion to the lit. sense ‘desert-dweller.’)
1671. Milton, P. R., I. 8. Thou Spirit who ledst this glorious Eremite Into the Desert.
1832. Lytton, Eugene A., X. The twilight Eremites of books and closets.
1847. Emerson, Woodnotes, Wks. (Bohn), I. 430. The little eremite Flies gaily forth, and sings in sight.
2. In the formal designation of certain monastic orders: e.g., Eremites (Hermits) of St. Augustine, a branch of the Augustinian Friars.
1577–87. Holinshed, Chron., III. 926/1. At Padua in the church of the heremites of saint Augustine.
1651. Life Father Sarpi (1676), p. vi. The Mother begun to have almost a perpetual conversation among those immur’d Hermites of Saint Hermagora.
1773. Noorthouck, New Hist. London, 600. The founder of the eremites of St. Anthony.
3. A (? quasi-religious) mendicant, a vagabond (see HERMIT).
1495. Act 11 Hen. VII., c. 2 § 3. Every vagabounde heremyte or begger able to labre.
4. attrib.
1651. W. Cartwright, Ordinary, I. v. in Hazl., Dodsley, XII. 231. Let us try To win that old eremite thing.
1816. Scott, Antiq., xx. Like a grey palmer, or eremite preacher.
1843. Carlyle, Past & Pr. (1858), 250. Stylitisms, eremite fanaticisms and fakeerisms.
1861. J. Sheppard, Fall Rome, xi. 587. The eremite and monastic theory of the Christian life which was then almost universally held.
