Definition

Devout is an adjective that describes someone who is deeply religious, pious, or devoted to a particular faith or belief system.

Pronunciation

US English

UK English


See Synonyms, Antonyms and Usage

Excerpts from News Articles

When you deal with state dinners, like with [President] Eisenhower, then you deal with the protocol usually. Otherwise, during the week, on Monday I'd usually sit down with [Madame Yvonne de Gaulle] and do the menu for the week. And certainly on Sunday they were very devout Catholics. So after church it was the family dinner, children, grandchildren and so forth. So at that point they ate what they wanted, the way they wanted. Madame de Gaulle [would say], "I want a leg of lamb, not too rare, it's no good for the president."

Logo 2022-10-01 NPR

The engagement was dissolved and her father then accepted a new proposal from a doctor. “I knew his family were very devout people,” Saima said in an interview with The Times UK newspaper. She met the doctor “once, at our engagement celebration,” she told the reporter.

Logo 2023-03-30 Al Jazeera

“I was meeting with two leaders who are deeply devout and religious men who spent a great portion of their time at Camp David in prayer,” said Carter, adding that they all agreed they “worship the same God.”

Logo 2023-04-01 CNN News

This too inspired me, an atheist: I admire and seek out the devout , and attend services of all kinds. It’s become common now, picking up religious practices as a form of self-care. James invites us to be open to the mysterious, from God to psychic phenomena. We act on ‘insufficient evidence’ in all areas of life, he said.


On some level, lockdown was the perfect time to be shunned—there were no parties to be disinvited from, no one was hanging out without me. I streamed coverage of Harry and Meghan’s move to California while I cut off contact with devout family members and watched friends unfollow me on Instagram.

Logo 2023-04-07 Literary Hub

Washington (a standout presence in Netflix’s “Tall Girl” franchise) and Bailey establish a charming duo in early scenes — including the funny moment they align their disparate dancing styles while crashing a party at Ty’s house. Washington said she “fell in love” with the character, who reminded her of devout classmates from a stint in bible college before she became a full-time actor.

Logo 2023-04-07 The Washington Post

Throughout these travels she conducts edifying conversations with her elders, who are all charmed by her opinionated confidence. The story’s schoolbook quality is enhanced by the fact that everyone around this carefree rich girl is invariably kind and generous, and espouses the same values of secular humanism, from her orthodox rabbi to her maternal grandmother, “a devout atheist who is nonetheless careful not to sabotage the Jewish faith of her only granddaughter.”.

Logo 2023-04-08 The New York Times

One person with connections to the family said they detected the hand of the four central offspring in Smith’s exit. “Her devout religious views may have been the thorn that drew blood,” they said, adding that some resistance may have come from Elizabeth, 54, and Prudence, 65, rather than James, 50, or Lachlan, 51.

Logo 2023-04-08 The Guardian

Kacsmaryk, a devout Christian with a history of antiabortion views, released his 67-page opinion on Good Friday. He sided with conservative groups seeking to reverse the FDA’s approval of mifepristone in 2000 as safe and effective, which was the first time a judge suspended the decades-old approval of a medication over the objections of the FDA and the drug’s manufacturer.

Logo 2023-04-10 The Washington Post

A devout Christian, Judge Kacsmaryk had voiced his opposition to same-sex marriage and anti-discrimination protections while rising through the ranks of Republican activists in Texas.

Logo 2023-04-10 The Independent

Colton Duncan, a devout Catholic from Ohio, rejects libertarianism, saying that he and his friends frequently discuss how to cultivate a moral economic system as an alternative to “woke capitalism and neocolonialism.” The ardently pro-Trump contingent on campus appears to be small, both among students and staff.

Logo 2023-04-10 The New Yorker

Her debut novel is “Natural Beauty.” For a long time, I was a devout follower of what the sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom calls the “prophets” of beauty — those who determine and enforce what is pleasing to the eye. I grew up in a small suburb near Houston, and until I was 7, I could count on one hand the number of people I saw who looked like me.

Logo 2023-04-11 The Washington Post

A devout Christian, Karamo has framed most things outside of her worldview as a direct result of “Satanism,” condemning everything from yoga (which she called a “satanic ritual”) to popular musicians to Democrats as “evil.”

Logo 2023-04-11 CNN News

Not all humanists were atheists, or even unorthodox believers – Erasmus was devout – but the pressure to distinguish between what human beings actually are and what a religious believer might think them destined to be was always going to be difficult to sustain. The hostile divide between religion and freethinking humanism erupted in the 18th century, rising to a height by the mid-19th.

Logo 2023-04-11 The Spectator

Such an uplifting message from the always devout and thoughtful Donald Trump, although it’s really just a dog whistle about his supposed persecution to his most loyal followers.

Logo 2023-04-11 MSNBC News

The once anti-Trump DeMastus was quick to remind that Trump blamed devout abortion opponents for Republicans’ weaker-than-expected showing in last year’s congressional elections. Notably, Trump said candidates who opposed legal abortion in cases of rape or incest or to save the life of the pregnant woman “lost a large numbers of votes.”

Logo 2023-04-12 Associated Press

By contrast, John Bulkeley “emerged as a leader on his own merits”. A working seaman whose job, as gunner, was to oversee the ship’s cannon, he started foraging food, constructing shelter and bartering supplies from the moment his feet touched land. Others began looking to him for answers. Mr Grann writes that little is known about Bulkeley except that he was a devout Christian who swung hard in a fight. Yet he was no brute: he kept a detailed journal of Wager’s travails, peppered with verse.

Logo 2023-04-13 The Economist

Utopia is often thought to have been a socialist response (before the advent of socialism), to the difficulties of the age in which More lived. But More was a devout Catholic statesman – in 1886 he was beatified by Pope Leo XIII. Utopia reflected the place of monasticism in the Catholic tradition.

Logo 2023-04-13 The Conversation

One friend described Teixeira in an interview as patriotic, a devout Catholic and a libertarian with an interest in guns and doubts about America’s future. The friend said he met Teixeira before 2020 on a Discord server mainly focused on guns and libertarian politics, and bonded over their shared interest in Glock handguns and Catholicism.

Logo 2023-04-13 The Washington Post

Informal money flows can redistribute wealth. Urban workers send money back to the village; the devout give alms to the needy; politicians hand out jobs and money to networks of allies. In low-income countries this kind of support makes a much bigger dent in poverty than do state-run programmes of social assistance, according to researchers at ODI , a think-tank in London. But the impact on inequality is muted because the rich get larger private transfers than the poor.

Logo 2023-04-13 The Economist

For whatever reason, this is no longer the case, though the UK has not yet travelled so disastrously down this road as America, where apparently you cannot believe in the Roe v Wade judgement and the right to abortion and be a Republican (other than “in name only”). Conversely, though one senses not to the same militant degree, it may be difficult for some to be a devout Roman Catholic opponent of abortion (broadly) and a Democrat.

Logo 2023-04-14 The Independent

DeSantis’s top staff have been highly involved in the abortion issue, according to several people familiar with his office. Many members of his leadership team are devout Catholics and are more passionate about the abortion issue than the governor is, one of the people said. “He doesn’t want to talk a lot about it,” the person said.

Logo 2023-04-14 The Washington Post

The president, a devout Catholic, took a moment to look at the plaque before entering the hospice to meet the staff.

Logo 2023-04-14 The Guardian

He built a powerful coalition that worked toward criminalizing contraceptive devices, abortion, prostitution and pornography. Frances Willard, a devout Methodist, led the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, an organization devoted to the prohibition of manufacturing or selling alcohol. Unlike the evangelical reform movements of the mid-19th century, the brand of reform championed by religious leaders like Comstock and Willard focused on state intervention — and state power — rather than moral suasion at the individual level.

Logo 2023-04-14 Politico

Former Vice President Mike Pence, a devout Christian and conservative who has long been at the forefront of the fight to restrict abortion, came out for abortion restrictions across every U.S. state after the Supreme Court after Roe fell.

Logo 2023-04-14 MSNBC News

Odenkirk says in his 2022 memoir Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama that his father—an alcoholic who left the family in the 1970s and died in 1986—was “a hollow man,” and he makes clear that his father cast a lasting shadow on him. His mother, who died in 2021, was a devout Roman Catholic for whom motherhood was “her true and greatest profession,” as her children wrote in an obituary. Growing up, Odenkirk loved Monty Python, and it was an early influence on his comedy.


Non-believers must simply accept that, say, Camilla’s 3ft ivory rod with a dove “symbolic of the Holy Ghost” is too critical to national reverence to allow substitution with a replica more suited to the same nation’s acquired aversion to ivory. That this rod was brand-new on its introduction in 1685 merely underlines, to the devout , the still greater sacredness of an older spoon used in the anointing process. And that this year’s olive oil is literally from the Mount of Olives demonstrates, says the archbishop of Canterbury, “the deep historic link between the Coronation, the Bible and the Holy Land”.

Logo 2023-04-16 The Guardian

In the annual ceremony observed for more than a millennium, a flame taken from Jesus’s tomb in the church is used to light the candles of believers in Greek Orthodox communities. The devout believe the origin of the flame is a miracle and is shrouded in mystery.

Logo 2023-04-16 Al Jazeera

Jimmy Carter already had drawn months of media scrutiny as a devout Southern Baptist running for president. Then the 1976 Democratic nominee brought up sex and sin as he explained his religious faith to Playboy magazine.

Logo 2023-04-16 The Independent

And Gillian Frank, a historian of religion and sexuality and a visiting affiliate scholar at Princeton University, says Comstock embraced a devout form of Protestant Christianity that made him skeptical of ordinary people's ability to control their desires.

Logo 2023-04-18 NPR

"By allowing employers to refuse to accommodate employees' beliefs for almost any reason, Hardison forces devout employees to an impossible daily choice between religious duty and livelihood," the Muslim Public Affairs Council wrote in a brief.

Logo 2023-04-16 Reuters

Two days were definitely out of the question. Most Americans were devout Christians and thus set aside Sunday as a day of rest and worship. Wednesday in many areas was a market day, when farmers sold their crops in town.


Compared to today’s activists, the witch-burners were calm and measured. At least they could explain what they were up to and present a case for their manic violence. They were evil, coherent, and devout . We have no such luck with kids raised to believe in apocalyptic death cults and the supremacy of ‘self truth’ over The Truth. Individuals that tie their worldview to ‘feelings’ will remain adrift.

Logo 2023-04-17 The Spectator

As the novelist pointed out, it wasn’t, strictly speaking, impossible: Hernando de Soto had ventured to the area in 1541, members of his expedition wrote about their travels in journals that were translated into English, and at least one of those accounts was circulating in London when Shakespeare was working there in 1609. To Portis, it was also perfectly obvious that the exploration of his home state could have been fine fodder for the Bard: “It is just the kind of chronicle he quarried for his plots and characters, and DeSoto, a brutal, devout , heroic man brought low, is certainly of Shakespearean stature. But, bad luck, there is no play, with a scene at the Camden winter quarters, and, in another part of the forest, at Smackover Creek, where willows still grow aslant the brook.

Logo 2023-04-17 The New Yorker

Biden is a devout Catholic who has wrestled with the issue. He has staked out a position in favor of abortion rights, though in his long Senate career, he cast votes opposing federal funding for most abortion services.

Logo 2023-04-17 MSNBC News