templum

Templum, templi is a second declension NEUTER noun: templum in the nominative and accusative, templi in the genitive, and templa in the plural.

Its first meaning is not a building at all. A templum was a space cut out and marked off by an augur, a rectangle of sky and the ground answering to it, inside which the birds were watched for omens. Only afterwards did the word settle on the consecrated building put up in such a space. That original sense of "marking off and observing" is why contemplari, "to gaze at, to consider", is built on it, and why English got both temple and contemplate from the same root. The Latin for a temple as a house of a god, aedes, sits alongside it and is commoner in some authors.

Frequency warning. Templum stands this high because our corpus takes in the Vulgate and later religious writing, where the Temple at Jerusalem and its imagery are constant. In Caesar it is close to absent, and in Cicero it is a word for particular buildings on particular days. Do not conclude that the average Roman sentence mentions a temple.