Diakonissa

Diakonissa is a Greek title of honor that is used to refer to a deacon's wife. It is derived from diakonos—the Greek word for deacon (literally, "server"). There does not currently seem to be any standard English equivalent, so most English-speaking Orthodox Christians will use the title most common in the old country churches from which their local family or parish finds its origin.

For the title of a female in clerical orders, see Deaconess.

Diakonissa was also the term used in the ancient Church for the order of deaconess, a class of ordained women who saw to the care of women in the community.

Other languages

In Arabic, a deacon's wife is called Shamassy (derived from Shamas, Arabic for "deacon"). Romanian uses a derivative from the Greek term, Diaconiţă, as does Serbian, Djakonitsa (pronounced jack-on-eet'-sa). Other Slavic traditions generally use the same word for a deacon's wife that is used for a priest's wife: Matushka (Russian), Panimatushka (Ukrainian), etc.

gollark: No, I'm pretty sure the operating principles are very different.
gollark: This could not* go wrong.
gollark: The rockets are quite expensive, though, so the obvious solution is to have cheaper externally propelled vehicle things launched from the ground.
gollark: But several hours to go across the country is still quite significant, and if your passenger transport system cannot be used as a weapon of mass destruction it is not very good, so the obvious solution is ridiculously expensive rocket-based travel.
gollark: But rail would be quite fast, possibly cheaper if you ignore the huge initial investment, and could ship cargo!

See also
    This article incorporates text from Diakonessa at OrthodoxWiki which is licensed under the CC-BY-SA and GFDL.
    This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.