Disciplinary

How to spell disciplinary

12 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce disciplinary

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does disciplinary mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to the correction or punishment of someone who has broken rules.
2. adjectiveRelating to a particular branch of academic knowledge or study.

Disciplinary in a sentence

• The company opened a disciplinary hearing after the safety breach.

• The research crossed several disciplinary boundaries, blending history and biology.

• Repeated lateness can lead to disciplinary action by the manager.

• The grant funded a project with strong disciplinary focus in chemistry.

Where does disciplinary come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin disciplina, which meant 'instruction', 'training', or 'a body of knowledge', and that noun was itself built on discipulus, meaning 'a learner' or 'pupil', the same root that gives us 'disciple'. The Latin sense was broad: it covered both the teaching a pupil received and the orderly conduct expected of them, which is why the modern word still leans in two directions, towards correction on one side and towards a field of study on the other. The adjective form arose from disciplinarius, 'relating to instruction', and English picked it up in the seventeenth century, largely through learned Latin usage rather than French. Over time the punitive sense, as in measures taken to enforce rules, became dominant in everyday speech. The spelling trap lives in the middle: the unstressed vowels in 'dis-ci-pli-nar-y' all blur into schwa sounds, so writers must remember the silent 'c' patterning of 'disciple' underneath and resist dropping a syllable. Keeping the parent word 'discipline' in mind is the surest guard against misspelling.

How the word is built

• discipl- (from Latin discipulus, a learner or pupil)
• -in- (from disciplina, instruction)
• -ary (adjective suffix, 'relating to')