Faculty

How to spell faculty

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce faculty

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does faculty mean?

1. nounThe teaching staff of a university, college, or one of its academic departments.
2. nounAn inherent mental or physical power or capability.

Faculty in a sentence

• The entire faculty gathered for the start of the academic year.

• Even at ninety he retained every mental faculty he had ever possessed.

• She joined the faculty of medicine after years of clinical work.

• A long illness had dulled her faculty for concentration.

Where does faculty come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes from the Latin facultas, meaning 'capability', 'power', or 'opportunity to do something'. That noun was built on facilis, meaning 'easy' or 'doable', which itself grew from facere, the everyday Latin verb 'to do' or 'to make'. English took the word in through Old French faculte during the 1300s, first in the sense of an inherent power of the mind or body, such as the faculty of sight or reason. From there the meaning broadened to cover a recognised branch of learning in a medieval university, since a faculty was the body qualified to teach a particular subject, and that academic sense gave us today's use for the teaching staff of a college. The same facere root sits inside relatives such as 'facile', 'facility', and 'faculty', and noticing the buried 'facil' idea of ease and ability helps fix the tricky unstressed middle of the word.

How the word is built

• facult- (from Latin facultas: capability, power)
• -y (noun suffix)