Faculties

How to spell faculties

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce faculties

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does faculties mean?

1. nounA person's mental and physical powers, such as reasoning, memory, and the senses.
2. nounThe separate teaching divisions or departments of a university, or their academic staff collectively.

Faculties in a sentence

• Despite his age, he kept all his mental faculties sharp.

• The university merged two of its smaller faculties to cut costs.

• The medication left her drowsy and dulled her faculties for hours.

• Funding was distributed evenly across all the faculties.

Where does faculties come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word descends from the Latin facultas, meaning 'capability', 'power', or 'an available means of doing something', which was itself a shortened form of the older facilitas, 'ease of doing', built on the verb facere, 'to do or make'. That same facere root underlies a whole family of familiar English words, including 'facile', 'facility', and 'faculty' itself. English took it in through Old French faculte during the 1300s, first to describe a mental or physical power such as sight, speech, or reason, and soon afterwards to name a branch of learning at a university, since each branch represented a distinct 'power' or department of knowledge. The plural 'faculties' therefore swings between two everyday meanings: a person's mental and bodily powers, and the academic divisions of a college. The spelling trap is the unstressed middle: the schwa in '-cul-' and the regular y-to-ies plural ending, which writers can blur into a single tidy guess.

How the word is built

• facult- (from Latin facultas: capability, power)
• -y (noun)
• -es (plural; y becomes ies)