ラテン語の pulpitum, pulpit, small pulpit が語源。PIE*ped「足」が語源である可能性があり、語源はfoot、pilotと同じ。
英語の語源
pulpit
pulpit: [14] Classical Latin pulpitum, a word of unknown origin, denoted ‘platform, stage’. This sense was originally carried over into English (Miles Coverdale, in his 1535 translation of II Chronicles 6:13, wrote ‘Salomon had made a brasen pulpit … upon the same stood he’, where the 1611 Authorized Version was later to have ‘Solomon had made a brasen scaffold … and upon it he stood’).
But it was eventually swamped by a subsidiary sense which emerged in medieval Latin: pulpitum had been applied particularly to platforms on which people stood to speak in public, and in ecclesiastical usage it came to denote a ‘raised structure on which preachers stand’.
pulpit (n.)
early 14c., from Late Latin pulpitum "raised structure on which preachers stand," in classical Latin "scaffold; stage, platform for actors," of unknown origin. Also borrowed in Middle High German as pulpit (German Pult "desk"). Sense of "Christian preachers and ministers generally" is from 1560s. Pulpiteer, old contemptuous term for "professional preacher," is recorded from 1640s.
例文
1. I spoke from the pulpit ad lib.
私は演壇で即興演説をしました。
2.He vituperated from the pulpit the vices of the court.
教会の教壇で宮廷の罪を叱責した。
3.The pews，the pulpit and the altar are of a piece with the simple elegance of the church itself.
ベンチ、布道壇、祭壇は教会の素朴で上品な雰囲気と一致している。
4.The pulpit is against horse racing on Sunday.
日曜日の競馬に反対する教士たち。
5.All the young men at Pulpit Hill who were eligible-those who were twenty-one-were going into service.