Multidisciplinary

How to spell multidisciplinary

17 letters · 7 syllables

How to pronounce multidisciplinary

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does multidisciplinary mean?

1. adjectiveCombining or involving several distinct academic or professional fields of study.

Multidisciplinary in a sentence

• The hospital set up a multidisciplinary team of doctors, nurses, and social workers.

• Her multidisciplinary research combined economics, biology, and law.

Where does multidisciplinary come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word joins the Latin prefix multi-, meaning 'many', to the older word discipline, which English took from the Latin disciplina, meaning 'instruction' or 'a branch of knowledge'. That noun was built on discipulus, 'a pupil or learner', which in turn came from discere, 'to learn', so at its heart the word is about fields of learning. The adjective form discipline plus -ary gives 'disciplinary', describing something relating to a subject area, and adding multi- in the twentieth century produced 'multidisciplinary' to describe work that draws on several subjects at once. The term became common in academic and professional English from roughly the 1940s onward as research and teamwork increasingly crossed traditional subject boundaries. The spelling trap lives in the middle: writers must remember the single l and single n in 'discipline' and the faint vowel in 'disciplin-ary', plus the joining i that links multi- to the rest.

How the word is built

• multi- (many)
• disciplin (from Latin disciplina: field of study, instruction)
• -ary (adjective suffix)