Doctoral

How to spell doctoral

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce doctoral

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does doctoral mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to the highest academic degree or to study undertaken to earn it.

Doctoral in a sentence

• She spent four years on her doctoral research into coastal erosion.

• The university offers funding for students in doctoral programmes.

Where does doctoral come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin doctor, which literally meant 'teacher' or 'instructor', formed from the verb docere, 'to teach'. In the medieval universities of Europe a doctor was someone qualified to teach a subject at the highest level, and the title was conferred only after lengthy study, which is why we still speak of earning a doctorate today. The adjective doctoralis was built on this noun and reached English in the late 1500s, by way of French, to describe anything relating to the rank or degree of a doctor. The same docere root survives in everyday relatives such as 'doctrine' (a body of teaching) and 'document' (something that instructs or informs). Because the second vowel is an unstressed schwa, writers sometimes hesitate over whether it is spelled 'doctorial' or 'doctoral', but the form anchored on doctor plus -al is the correct one.

How the word is built

• doctor (from Latin doctor: teacher)
• -al (adjective suffix)