Definition of "sanctum"
sanctum
noun
plural sanctums or sancta
A place set apart, as with a sanctum sanctorum; a sacred or private place; a private retreat or workroom.
Quotations
As he descended the stairs, two persons passed him, so remarkably dissimilar in their persons, dress, and carriage, that he could not forbear to look earnestly at them, as forming a criterion of the mixed character of company admissible in such places, and which was to him (with his preconceived notions of the inviolability of the female sanctum) an insuperable objection to such scenes of general resort.
1842, [anonymous collaborator of Letitia Elizabeth Landon], chapter XXXIX, in Lady Anne Granard; or, Keeping up Appearances. […], volume II, London: Henry Colburn, […], page 200
His colleagues quailed when, in 1986, he first sat on the court as a brash 50-year-old whose experience had been mostly as a combative government lawyer: a justice who, in that sanctum of columns and deep judicial silence, was suddenly firing questions like grapeshot.
2016 February 20, “Obituary: Antonin Scalia: Always right”, in The Economist