Are a cemetery and a graveyard the same thing? You would be dead wrong to think so.
Here are some clues: In the Paris Père Lachaise Cemetery, you will find the cemetery plots of around a million people of all faiths (and of no faith), including such luminaries as Molière, Fréderic Chopin, Georges Seurat, Édith Piaf, and Jim Morrison of The Doors. In Arlington National Cemetery, across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., you will find the cemetery plots of more than 400,000 people, including veterans and their family members, and notable figures such as President John F. Kennedy, World War II soldier Audie Murphy, civil rights activist Medgar Evers, and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, among many others of all faiths (and of no faith).
In the graveyard at Trinity Church in New York City, and in Boston’s Granary Burying Ground, adjacent to Park Street Church, are the graves of the U.S. Founding Fathers, and far fewer people than in the cemeteries referenced above.
“Cemetery” is the older of these two words, first used in the 1400s in English. It’s ultimately from the Greek koimētērion, meaning both “sleeping chamber” and “burial place.” The first known use of “graveyard” in print occurred a few centuries later, in the mid-1700s.
The practice of burying the dead extends back millennia, though. In the Neolithic period, from around 10,000 BCE to around 3000 BCE, hunter-gatherers settled in agricultural communities and created separate spaces to bury their dead. They constructed tombs outside settlements using massive stones known as megaliths.
Ancient Romans considered burial places a health hazard, and so established them outside the walls of Rome. But Christians did not share that same concern, and so used catacombs as mass graves as well as places of worship. Over time, they began to bury their dead in churches and churchyards. The word “grave” has an obsolete meaning of “an excavated pit, ditch, or trench,” which is how the word “graveyard” developed for the burial grounds in churchyards.
Thus the distinction: A cemetery is a burial space for people of all faiths (or none), typically operated by a municipality or commercial entity, whereas a graveyard is a church-affiliated, usually smaller burial ground. The words are used fairly synonymously today, even reflected in the modern dictionary definitions, but historically, these words have been separated by faith.
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