Academies

How to spell academies

9 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce academies

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does academies mean?

1. nounInstitutions of higher learning, specialised training schools, or societies of scholars and artists.

Academies in a sentence

• Several military academies accepted his application this spring.

• The city funds three new academies for science and the arts.

Where does academies come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word traces back to the Greek Akademeia, the name of a public garden and grove on the outskirts of ancient Athens where the philosopher Plato taught his students. The grove itself was named after a local hero called Akademos, so the place originally had nothing to do with learning at all. Because Plato's school met there, the name came to stand for the school itself, and then for any community of scholars. Latin took the word as academia, and English borrowed it through French as 'academy' in the 1500s, applying it to societies of learned people and later to specialised teaching institutions. The plural 'academies' follows the regular English rule of changing a final consonant-plus-y to -ies, which is the small spelling trap here: not 'academys'.

How the word is built

• academ- (from Akademeia, the grove where Plato taught)
• -y (noun suffix)
• -ies (plural of words ending in consonant
• y)