Internship

How to spell internship

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce internship

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does internship mean?

1. nounA period of supervised practical work, often temporary and junior, taken to gain experience in a profession.

Internship in a sentence

• She completed a summer internship at a law firm before her final year.

• The marketing internship paid a modest stipend and lasted three months.

Where does internship come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word combines 'intern' with the native English suffix '-ship', which marks a state, rank, or position and goes back to Old English '-scipe', the same ending found in 'friendship' and 'partnership'. The 'intern' part comes through French 'interne' from the Latin 'internus', meaning 'inward' or 'internal', a word that originally described someone living inside an institution. In nineteenth-century medicine an 'intern' was a junior doctor resident within a hospital, learning on the job, and the abstract noun 'internship' followed naturally to name that period of supervised training. From medicine the sense broadened in twentieth-century American usage to cover any temporary, often junior or unpaid, work placement undertaken to gain experience. The spelling is reliably regular: it is simply 'intern' plus 'ship', so the only real care needed is remembering the single 'n' and not doubling letters at the join.

How the word is built

• intern (one in training, from Latin internus 'inward')
• -ship (state or position suffix)