How to Use ossuary in a Sentence

ossuary

noun
  • The site, known as an ossuary, is the largest in the world, containing the bones of more than six million Parisians.
    — CBS News, 4 Mar. 2022
  • Those remains get moved to an ossuary — a communal residence for bones.
    — Steve Rubenstein, San Francisco Chronicle, 5 May 2018
  • Or bones can be deposited into the cemetery’s common ossuary.
    — New York Times, 21 May 2018
  • The bones were then collected and often placed in stone boxes, known as ossuaries, inside the cave chamber.
    — Washington Post, 29 Aug. 2019
  • The rest are stacked in ossuaries inside vaults that have deteriorated over the decades.
    — James Badcock, latimes.com, 10 May 2018
  • In the 19th century, many churches again emptied their cemeteries and added even more skulls to this vast ossuary.
    — Rick Steves, USA TODAY, 13 Nov. 2019
  • Each columbarium also will have an ossuary, which will hold ashes placed in satin bags in a single underground chamber.
    — Mary Divine, Twin Cities, 9 Feb. 2017
  • In 2002, an ossuary surfaced in Israel, which appeared to confirm his identity.
    — National Geographic, 6 Mar. 2016
  • The inspiration is an ossuary, the crypts of the cardinals, of the monks in the 15th century, and the precious decorations.
    — Sarah Spellings, The Cut, 31 May 2018
  • The largest ossuary in the world is the network of catacombs beneath Paris, which reportedly house the bones of approximately six million people.
    — Daisy Hernandez, Popular Mechanics, 29 Feb. 2020
  • The extraordinarily high flames, propelled by strong winds from the south, reached the village’s homes and burned to ashes everything standing in between, including the cemetery’s ossuary.
    — Gaia Pianigiani, New York Times, 22 Aug. 2021
  • Gisotti said last week that investigators had located two ossuaries – small chambers where the bones of dead people are placed – under a stone slab manhole covering inside the Teutonic college itself.
    — Fox News, 20 July 2019
  • The Liberal Democrats had been consigned to the electoral ossuary as recently as last winter, limping along at around 8 percent in most opinion polls, and discussing bringing in a celebrity leader to raise the party’s profile.
    — Parker Richards, The New Republic, 29 July 2019
  • Work on a provisional ossuary – a building where bones of the dead are kept – began in 1920 to provide a sanctuary for the hundreds of thousands of bones that were scattered throughout the Verdun battlefield site.
    — Smithsonian, 26 May 2017
  • The careful arrangement of ossuaries within the dolmen suggests communal burial practices and sophisticated ceremonial planning, providing archaeologists with invaluable insight into societal structures in prehistoric Iberia.
    — Maria Mocerino, Interesting Engineering, 27 Sep. 2025

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'ossuary.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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