sojourn
part of speech
noun (a sojourn, sojourns); verb (sojourn, sojourns, sojourned, sojourning — formal)
meaning for a pupil
1) A sojourn is a short stay in a place that is not your home (formal). tree →
2) To sojourn is to stay somewhere for a while as a visitor (formal, old-fashioned). tree →
3) (Bible) In the Bible, to sojourn is to live in a land as a stranger or traveller, as Abraham did. tree →
sense in the lessons
You meet «sojourn» in travel writing, older books, Bible readings and exam texts; in everyday talk people say «stay» or «visit». It tells the reader that the stay was temporary. Phrases: a brief sojourn, a sojourn in the country.
examples
- After a short sojourn in Scotland, they came home. tree →
- The writer spent a sojourn by the sea. tree →
- Our sojourn at Gran's farm lasted a week. tree →
- The explorers sojourned in the desert for several days. tree →
- Christians read that Abraham sojourned in a strange land. tree →
- During his sojourn abroad he learned French. tree →
- They told that they, in crossing Hungary, had sojourned in a mountainous country called Transylvania, where the inhabitants only spoke German, while all around them nothing was spoken but Hungarian. tree →
note
It is a formal word; in normal speech say «stay». Pronounced SOJ-urn (or SO-jurn). Countable noun: a sojourn, sojourns. A sojourn is always temporary, not a move for ever.
In the corpora
- And Abraham journeyed from thence toward the land of the South, and dwelt between Kadesh and Shur; and he sojourned in Gerar.
- And Abraham sojourned in the land of the Philistines many days.
- And Jacob came unto Isaac his father to Mamre, to Kiriatharba — the same is Hebron — where Abraham and Isaac sojourned.
- One law shall be to him that is homeborn, and unto the stranger that sojourneth among you.'
- And if a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not do him wrong.
Trees and pragmatics
Every meaning and example of «sojourn» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.