Doctorate

How to spell doctorate

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce doctorate

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does doctorate mean?

1. nounThe highest academic degree awarded by a university, or the status of holding it.

Doctorate in a sentence

• She spent six years earning her doctorate in chemistry.

• A doctorate is usually required to lead independent research at a university.

Where does doctorate come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word descends from the Latin doctor, an agent noun meaning 'teacher' or 'one who teaches', formed from the verb docere, which literally meant 'to teach' or 'to instruct'. By the medieval period a doctor had become a learned person formally licensed to teach in a university, and the abstract status of holding that rank was captured by the Latin doctoratus. English took 'doctorate' from this source through the late medieval academic world, where the term marked the highest degree a faculty could confer. The same docere root still teaches us through close relatives such as 'document', 'doctrine', and 'docile' (literally 'easily taught'). The spelling preserves that Latin -or before the -ate ending, which is the part writers most often slip on, since the unstressed middle vowel offers no clear sound to guide them.

How the word is built

• doct- (from Latin docere: to teach)
• -or (agent: one who teaches)
• -ate (noun suffix: office or rank)