Each week The Sun's John McIntyre presents a relatively obscure but evocative word with which you may not be familiar, another brick to add to the wall of your vocabulary. This week's word:
WIDDERSHINS
When a bishop or priest censes an altar, proper ceremonial requires circling in a counterclockwise direction. Both counter and clock come to us ultimately from Latin (contra, "against," and clocca, "bell"). But English, deriving from both Germanic and Latin/French, has a rich range of choices of words with the same meaning
If you want to honor those Teutonic antecedents, widdershins, which means "counterclockwise," is available, coming from the German wider, "back," and sinnen, "to go, travel." It had become a Scottish dialect word by the early sixteenth century.
It might in fact be the preferable word to describe the motion of a cleric wielding a thurible, since its early sense, "contrary to the motion of the sun," long had occult associations and is used, the Oxford English Dictionary explains, "esp. in ritual circumambulation."
It's also fun to say, as is "ritual circumambulation."
Example: From The Adept by Katherine Kurtz and Deborah T. Harris: "Turning westward then, he began pacing off a circle to include the entire chapel area, going widdershins, shaking blood lavishly to mark the outline, his voice pitched barely above a whisper as he chanted the measured verses of a ritual invocation."