< French cirement ‘a waxing, a searing; a dressing, closing, covering, or mingling with wax’ (Cotgrave), < cirer to wax: compare also cere v. 2, to wrap (a corpse) in a waxed cloth or shroud. Always concretely in English: compare covering, wrap, wrapping, shroud, and similar vbl. ns. (Sometimes erroneously pronounced ˈsɛrɪ- after ceremony.)
1.
a. Almost always in pl.: Waxed wrappings for the dead; loosely, grave-clothes generally. Rarely in sing. = cerecloth; winding-sheet, shroud. (App. caught up by modern writers from Shakespeare, and used in the same loose rhetorical way as urn, ashes, etc.)
b. fig. (Chiefly in reference to ‘bursting cerements’ or similar notions.)
2. The action of ‘cering’ a dead body or its covering; the wax used. rare.
3. Waxy coating generally. rare. (OED)
"And finally, there it is: your face, floating
at my feet with nose pressed to transparent black ice;
yes, you are certainly dead, all the signs point to it.
Wrapped in white cerements,
white face more youthful
and grave than I have ever seen it, frowning slightly
as though it were reading, one eye blind
in a blond swath of hair,
vague smile like the velvet depression
the lost diamond has left in its case"
- Franz Wright, "Recurring Awakening", 6 June 2011 The New Yorker
I like how the OED calls it an erroneous pronunciation rather than an alternative pronunciation.
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