From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englishsanctumsanc‧tum /ˈsæŋktəm/ noun [countable] 1 → inner sanctum2 RRTBa holy place inside a temple
Examples from the Corpus
sanctum• Please recall how I've been penned in a sanctum on a planet for most of my days.• She strode through the door to the outer office of his sanctum, past his personal secretary, who blinked in astonishment.• Why should she have been invited into the inner sanctum while I had been so resolutely excluded?• Renaissance encyclopaedias often had architectural structures, as though the reader were progressing towards the inner sanctum of truth.• And there would be me, allowed into their inner sanctum.• I skirted the dike district too - or at any rate two big chicks denied me entry to their purple sanctum.• The Governor's sanctum was a leviathan suffused with the same dreary red light.• Ruby laser light stitched the interior of the sanctum like thinnest threads of stronger flame within a dully glowing oven.Origin sanctum (1500-1600) Late Latin Latin sanctus; → SAINT