Colleague

How to spell colleague

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce colleague

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does colleague mean?

1. nounA person you work with, especially in a profession or a shared workplace.

Colleague in a sentence

• A trusted colleague covered my shifts while I was on leave.

• She emailed every colleague in the department about the new policy.

Where does colleague come from?

Language of origin: French

Colleague came into English in the sixteenth century from the French collègue, which itself descends from the Latin collega. The Latin word literally meant 'one chosen to serve alongside another', built from com- meaning 'together' and legare meaning 'to depute, appoint or choose'. In Roman public life a collega was a fellow office-holder who shared the same magistracy, so the idea of shared duty was baked in from the start. The same legare root feeds into words like 'delegate' and 'legate', all carrying the sense of someone formally appointed to a role. The spelling trap is entirely French in origin: the soft '-eague' ending, mirrored in 'league', is what catches writers who expect a simpler '-eag' or '-eeg', and the silent 'u' is a leftover from that French route into English.

How the word is built

• col- (variant of com-: together)
• leag (from Latin legare: to choose, appoint)
• -ue (spelling vestige from French)