Stigmata are marks that appear on a person's hands and feet — and sometimes the side — that look like the wounds Christ received from the nails on the cross. In Christian belief, these marks appear on certain very holy people; St Francis of Assisi is the most famous case. The word is plural, and it takes a plural verb: "the stigmata were photographed", not "was". The singular is stigma. That singular is where students get surprised, because "stigma" in ordinary modern English usually means something else entirely — the shame society attaches to an illness or a situation ("the stigma of mental illness"). Both meanings grow from the same old root, a mark burnt or cut into the skin, but the plural "stigmata" is kept almost only for the religious sense. If you are talking about several kinds of social shame, English speakers say "stigmas". The word is formal and specialised: you meet it in religion, in history, and in horror films, not in everyday talk. Say it roughly stig-MAH-ta or STIG-ma-ta — both are heard.