Freshmen

How to spell freshmen

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce freshmen

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does freshmen mean?

1. nounMore than one first-year student at a school, college, or university; also newcomers to a group or activity.

Freshmen in a sentence

• The orientation week is designed to help incoming freshmen settle in.

• Two freshmen shared the dormitory room across the hall from mine.

Where does freshmen come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the plural of 'freshman', a compound built from the very old English adjective 'fresh', meaning new or recently come, and 'man', here used in the older neutral sense of 'person'. 'Fresh' descends from Old English 'fersc' and was reinforced by related Germanic forms, all carrying the idea of something newly made or not stale. The compound 'freshman' appeared in English in the 1500s to describe a novice or newcomer, and it quickly attached to universities to mean a student in the first year of study. The plural shifts the ending to '-men', following the same irregular pattern as 'man' to 'men', which is the spelling trap, since the singular '-man' tempts writers to leave the vowel unchanged. The word remains most common in American and Canadian education, where 'freshmen' name the entire first-year cohort.

How the word is built

• fresh (new, recently arrived)
• -men (plural of -man, person)