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A catacomb is an underground place where the dead are laid — not one grave in a field, but tunnels and rooms under the city, with spaces in the walls for bodies. The famous ones are in Rome; Paris has them too. Though actually those two are not the same kind of place: Rome's are old burial tunnels, while the Paris ones are former stone mines later filled with bones. English still uses one word for both. We often say the catacombs in the plural, even for one connected underground cemetery. A normal graveyard above ground is a cemetery, not a catacomb. The word feels old, dark, and a little ; horror films love it for that reason.
地下墓穴（多半指羅馬、巴黎那種連成隧道的；一般墳場不叫這個）
組成From Middle English catacombe, from Old English catacumbe / catacumbas, from Late Latin catacumbae — originally the name of the underground cemetery of St. Sebastian in Rome. Where that Latin name itself came from is unclear. It may be a reshaping of cata tumbās, “among the tombs” (Ancient Greek katá, “under,” + túmbos, “tomb”), perhaps mixed with a Latin verb for lying down. Some sources point instead to Greek kúmbē, “drinking vessel,” but the meaning does not fit well.
原始詞典資料1 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
catacombnoun/ˈkætəkuːm/
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An underground system of tunnels and chambers with recesses for graves, used (in former times) as a cemetery; a tunnel system used for burying the dead, as in Paris or Ancient Rome.
- Meronyms: crypt, ossuary
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。