Vatican City
5
4.1
- proper noun
:
Ciudad del Vaticano
- He's the head of Vatican City.
- the pope in Vatican City
- Pope Francis at Vatican City
- Cardinals gathered in Vatican City
Examples
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We built an embassy compound in Baghdad that's bigger than Vatican City.
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The Pope resides in Vatican City, which is the center of the Roman Catholic Church.
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So today he has been elected head of the Vatican City State.
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The hospital is outside Vatican City walls, and I think that means it's out of their jurisdiction.
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Vatican City does not rest on seven hills.
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Vatican City is not part of Rome.
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We must evacuate Vatican City.
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She guided us out of the bus and past the thousands of people waiting in line to get into Vatican City.
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Welcome to Vatican City.
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My really big goal this year is to make 1 million kina (about $200,000 US dollars) so I can take my dad to Hawaii to visit the university he went to, take my mum to Rome for a mass at the Vatican City, and have enough left to buy a house.
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Synonyms
194
3.7
An independent city state in Rome that is the Pope's official home and the center of the Catholic Church
A small independent city inside Rome where the Pope lives and the Catholic Church has main buildings
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning is directly compositional: 'Vatican' (the proper name for the religious/political entity) combined with 'city' yields a city associated with the Vatican. This structure is cross-linguistically parallel (e.g., Ciudad/Città del Vaticano) and would be predictable to a B1 learner who knows both constituents.
Etymology
Vatican City comes from Vatican, the small hill in Rome where long ago people went to pray and to hear people who said they could tell the future. Over time that place became the home of the 'Pope', so the name stuck and today Vatican City is the tiny independent 'state' where the 'Pope' lives.