Classmate

How to spell classmate

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce classmate

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does classmate mean?

1. nounA fellow member of the same class at a school, college, or course.

Classmate in a sentence

• A former classmate recognised her at the airport after twenty years.

• He borrowed lecture notes from a classmate who sat near the front.

Where does classmate come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word is a compound formed inside English by joining 'class' and 'mate'. The first element comes from the Latin classis, which originally referred to a division of the Roman people for military or tax purposes and later came to mean any group or category; it entered English in the 1500s and acquired its schoolroom sense, a body of students taught together, by the 1700s. The second element, 'mate', is a Germanic word that arrived in late medieval English from Middle Low German or Middle Dutch, where it described a companion who shared food, being tied to the same root as 'meat' in the old sense of 'food'. By the early nineteenth century the two parts were welded together to name a fellow member of one's class, on the same pattern as 'schoolmate' and 'roommate'. The spelling is reassuringly transparent: each half keeps its own form, so the only thing to remember is that it is written as one solid word with no space or hyphen.

How the word is built

• class (a group taught together)
• mate (companion, fellow)