vicar [ME] The original vicar was a person who stood in for another; at first, around 1300, as an earthly representative of God or Christ (the pope), and then for an absent parson or rector. From there the vicar became the minister in charge of a parish where tithes or taxes passed to a monastery or other religious house, who paid the vicar as their ‘representative’—a rector (LME from the Latin for ‘rule’), on the other hand, kept the tithes for himself. These meanings reflected the root, Latin vicarius ‘a substitute’, from which vicarious [M17th], ‘experienced in the imagination through the actions of another person’, also derives.