Plural of clerisy; multiple educated classes or literary elites within a society.
Plural of clerisy, which comes from clergy (from Old French clergie) with the -sy suffix (from Greek -sia). The term was revived by 19th-century intellectuals to describe the educated class.
The word 'clerisy' was a Victorian invention to describe the educated elite—poets, scholars, clergy—but it never quite caught on in English despite being used by famous writers like Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
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