Grad

How to spell grad

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce grad

What does grad mean?

1. nounAn informal term for a person who has completed a course of study and received a degree or diploma.
2. adjectiveUsed before a noun to mean relating to study undertaken after a first degree, as in graduate school.

Grad in a sentence

• noun

  The company hires a dozen grad every summer for its training scheme.

• adjective

  He spent four years in grad school before earning his doctorate.

• noun

  As a recent law grad, she struggled to find her first salaried role.

• adjective

  Applying to grad programmes meant retaking the entrance exam.

Where does grad come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Grad is a casual shortening of 'graduate', a word that traces back to the Latin gradus, meaning a 'step' or a 'pace', and by extension a 'stage' or 'degree' on a scale. The Latin verb graduari meant 'to take a step' and so 'to advance', which is why medieval universities used graduatus for someone who had advanced to a formal degree. English took up 'graduate' in the fifteenth century in exactly that academic sense, and the clipped 'grad' surfaced as informal speech in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially in North American campus slang. The same gradus root sits inside everyday relatives such as 'gradual', 'gradient', and 'degree', all of which carry that core idea of moving by steps. Because the word is so short and phonetic, its only real spelling trap is remembering the single 'd' ending rather than doubling it.

How the word is built

• clipped form of graduate, from grad- (Latin gradus: step, degree)
• -uate (verb/noun suffix, here dropped)