Intern

How to spell intern

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce intern

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does intern mean?

1. nounA student or recent graduate who works, often briefly and with little or no pay, to gain practical experience in a profession.
2. verbTo work as a trainee in order to gain supervised practical experience.
3. verbTo confine someone within a country or restricted area, especially as a prisoner during wartime.

Intern in a sentence

• noun

  The marketing intern spent the summer drafting press releases.

• verb

  She hopes to intern at a law firm before applying for jobs.

• verb

  The government decided to intern enemy nationals for the duration of the conflict.

• noun

  Each intern was assigned a senior mentor for the placement.

• verb

  Many students intern over the summer to build their resumes.

• verb

  Authorities chose to intern the refugees in a guarded camp near the border.

Where does intern come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin internus, meaning 'inward' or 'on the inside', the same root that gives us 'internal'. French shaped the modern senses: as the adjective and noun interne it described someone living 'inside' an institution, especially a junior doctor housed within the hospital where they trained, and English borrowed that medical sense in the nineteenth century. From there it broadened to mean any trainee gaining supervised experience inside an organisation. The verb runs along the same line of thought: to intern people is to confine them 'inside' a camp or restricted area, a usage that became grim and familiar during the twentieth-century world wars. Knowing the buried idea of 'inside' helps explain why the spelling keeps the plain -tern ending rather than anything fancier.

How the word is built

• intern- (from Latin internus: inward, internal); the trainee noun and the confining verb both rest on the idea of being kept 'inside' an institution