chapel

chapel.
1. Building for Christian worship, not a parish-church or cathedral, often without certain privileges normally those of a parish-church.

2. Room or building for worship in or attached to a castle, college, great house, monastery, palace, school, or other institution.

3. Oratory in a burial-aisle, mausoleum, mortuary-chapel, or elsewhere, with an altar where Masses might be chanted (i.e. chantry-chapel), often with funerary monuments.

4. Screened compartment in a large church, usually in aisles, to the east of transepts, or to the east of the high-altar, with its own altar, separately dedicated, and often of great magnificence (e.g. Lady-chapels for veneration of the Blessed Virgin Mary, as at Westminster Abbey). A chapel with its main axis on that of the nave of the church is called an axial chapel; those grouped around a semicircular end of a choir on radii of the apsidal east end are called radiating chapels, as in a chevet arrangement; and those disposed parallel to each other at the east end of a church, but not on the same alignment (as in Wells Cathedral (see drawing cathedral)), are echelon chapels.

5. Place of worship subordinate to the parish-church, created for the convenience of parishioners, such as a chapel-of-ease, when the parish was very large and distances great, or where populations increased.

6. Place of Christian worship other than buildings of the Established Church in England, so usually applied to a Nonconformist establishment. In Ireland it refers to an RC church, even in the early C21.