Doctor

How to spell doctor

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce doctor

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does doctor mean?

1. nounA person qualified to treat the sick, or someone holding the highest university degree.
2. verbTo alter or tamper with something dishonestly, especially documents or evidence.

Doctor in a sentence

• noun

  The doctor prescribed a course of antibiotics for the infection.

• verb

  The accountant was caught trying to doctor the company records.

• noun

  She finally earned the right to call herself a doctor after years of research.

• verb

  Investigators believe someone tried to doctor the photographs before the trial.

Where does doctor come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes straight from the Latin doctor, meaning 'teacher' or 'learned person', formed from the verb docere, 'to teach', plus the agent ending -tor that marks the doer of an action. The same docere root sits behind 'doctrine' (a teaching) and 'document' (something that instructs), which is a useful clue to the -ct- spelling in the middle. When English borrowed the word through Old French in the 1300s, it first meant a learned authority in the Church or a scholar qualified to teach, and the highest university degree, the doctorate, still preserves that academic sense. The modern meaning of a qualified physician grew up alongside this, since a 'doctor of medicine' was literally someone learned in the healing arts. The everyday verb sense, to tamper with or falsify something, is much later and English in flavour, drawing on the idea of a doctor secretly treating or altering a body.

How the word is built

• doc- (from docere: to teach)
• -tor (agent suffix: one who)