Origins
The English word 'temple' descends from Old English 'tempel,' itself a very early borrowing from Latin 'templum.' The Latin term is one of the most fascinating in Roman religious vocabulary because its original meaning had nothing to do with a building. A templum was a space — a rectangular zone of sky or ground marked out by an augur (a Roman priest specializing in divination) using a curved staff called a lituus. Within this consecrated rectangle, the augur observed the flight of birds, lightning, and other omens to determine the will of the gods.
The word derives from the Proto-Indo-European root *tem-, meaning 'to cut.' The templum was thus literally 'a cutting' or 'a section' — a portion of the visible world separated from the profane remainder for sacred observation. This sense of cutting or sectioning connects 'temple' to an unexpected cousin: the Greek word 'temnein' (to cut), source of English 'anatomy' (a cutting up), 'atom' (uncuttable), and '-tomy' (surgical cutting, as in appendectomy).
The semantic shift from 'consecrated space' to 'building' occurred gradually in Latin. As Roman religion formalized, the open-air templum became associated with the permanent structures erected on inaugurated ground. By the classical period, 'templum' could mean both the abstract consecrated zone and the physical edifice. English inherited only the architectural sense, though the original spatial meaning survives indirectly in 'contemplate' — from Latin 'contemplari,' literally 'to gaze at a templum together,' meaning to share in the augur's intense observation.
Proto-Indo-European Roots
Another etymological relative is 'template,' which entered English from French in the seventeenth century. A template was originally a small temple-shaped piece of wood used as a building gauge — a thin plate placed across a wall to distribute the weight of a beam. The connection to 'temple' was through the sense of a carefully measured and cut space, preserving the PIE root's meaning of 'to cut.'
The word entered Old English very early, likely through Christian missionary contact with Latin in the seventh and eighth centuries. Unlike many Latin religious borrowings that passed through Old French (such as 'church' taking a different route through Greek), 'temple' appears to have been borrowed directly from written Latin, which explains why the Old English form 'tempel' preserves the Latin spelling so closely.
Across the Germanic languages, the word was borrowed similarly: German 'Tempel,' Dutch 'tempel,' Swedish 'tempel,' and Danish 'tempel' all reflect direct Latin adoption. The Romance languages naturally inherited the word from Latin: French 'temple,' Spanish 'templo,' Italian 'tempio,' Portuguese 'templo,' and Romanian 'templu.'
Latin Roots
The word's cultural history in English is intertwined with biblical translation. The Temple of Solomon, described in the Hebrew Bible (where the Hebrew word is 'heikhal' or 'beit hamikdash'), was rendered as 'templum' in the Latin Vulgate and thence as 'temple' in English Bibles. This association gave the English word a specifically Judeo-Christian coloring that persists today — English speakers tend to use 'temple' for Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, and ancient religious buildings, while reserving 'church' for Christian structures, a distinction that would have puzzled a Roman, for whom any sacred building was a templum.
The Knights Templar took their name from their headquarters on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, and their round churches across Europe — including the Temple Church in London — in turn gave their name to the legal district known as the Temple, where barristers still practice today.