It’s something we don’t always like to talk about in the Western world.

But death is all around us, and it’s one of the only unifying things about everyone on this planet.

Everyone will die, and most people’s remains will end up in some kind of cemetery or graveyard.

But what is the difference between the two? And is it an important distinction?

There is a myth haunting the internet that a cemetery is a non-religious burial ground where bodies and ashes can both be buried, whilst graveyards are attached to a church and are a place where ashes cannot be interred.

However, according to David Sloane from the University of South California, this is not the case. In an interview with Snopes, Sloane claimed that the myth is simply untrue. And, as an expert on burial grounds, he should know:

“There is little or no difference between a graveyard and a cemetery. Either can be places next to a church (although most of those are called churchyards).”

So why do we have these two words, seemingly used in different contexts, if there is actually no difference between them at all?

To answer this question, it is important to understand the etymology – meaning the origins and evolving meanings – of the two words.

In his book The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains, Professor Thomas Laqueur from the University of California, Berkeley, explains that ‘churchyard’ was used generally to refer to – literally – the yard adjoining a church. During the Middle Ages, ‘graveyard’ and ‘churchyard’ were synonyms of one another; since all burial sites in religious societies were controlled by the church, the words meant the same thing.

On the other hand, as Laqueur writes, the word ‘cemetery’ has much more complex origins, which can be traced back using early Renaissance era dictionaries:

“The word “cemetery,” when it first appeared in English in 1485, was a synonym for “churchyard” […] “Churchyard” itself was too easy a word to merit definition; dictionaries in the early days concentrated on hard words.”

“Cemetery,” by contrast, was a hard word with a long convoluted history. It comes from the Greek koimhthrion and its Latin cognate coemeterium, and originally meant a sleeping place, a dormitory.”

So while graveyards and churchyards were inherently religious sites, cemeteries had not always been that way. Instead, this word had much less macabre origins in the beginning.

It is logical, then, that when religion became less commonplace in society, the non-religious wanted a secular site to bury their loved ones.

‘Cemetery’, with its non-religious connotations, was adopted as the name of a site for secular burials. And, since they were not attached to religious buildings, cemeteries became a place for gathering, a welcome place for visiting the dead and enjoying at one’s leisure.

So there was more freedom around cemeteries. Is this where the myth that ashes can only be interred in cemeteries comes from.

Well, sort of. The truth is a little more complex than that.

In the past, religious groups prohibited cremation on the grounds that it might prevent resurrection. With the obvious link to Jesus, the church opposed the idea of a body being cremated.

However, as science became more commonplace and ideas of resurrection diminished, religions ultimately began to modernise and accept cremation as an alternative to traditional burial, as Laqueur explains in his book:

“As corporeal resurrection became less theologically and emotionally exigent, the representational power of putting a dead body in ground from which it would rise again incorruptible diminished; cremation—in a sense the rapid release of a spirit from its fleshly prison—became more plausible.”

So while the idea that the burial or scattering of ashes is prohibited in a graveyard is now untrue, it would have been accurate in previous centuries.

The conclusion: in the twenty-first century, cemeteries and graveyards are pretty much the same thing. Feel free to keep using the words interchangeably if you wish.

After all, you have to look far into the past to really understand the difference between the secular and religious origins of these two words.

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