Philosophy

How to spell philosophy

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce philosophy

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does philosophy mean?

1. nounThe study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence.
2. nounA personal set of guiding principles or an attitude that shapes how someone lives or works.

Philosophy in a sentence

• She earned a degree in philosophy before training as a lawyer.

• His business philosophy centres on treating staff fairly and paying suppliers on time.

• The lecture covered ancient Greek philosophy and its leading thinkers.

• Her philosophy of saving a little each month kept her free of debt.

Where does philosophy come from?

Language of origin: Greek

Philosophy comes from the Greek philosophia, which combines philos, meaning 'loving' or 'dear', with sophia, meaning 'wisdom'. The whole word therefore meant something like 'the love of wisdom', and tradition credits the thinker Pythagoras with describing himself modestly as a lover of wisdom rather than a wise man. The term passed from Greek into Latin as philosophia, then travelled through Old French as philosophie before settling into English in the medieval period, where it covered all systematic knowledge, including what we now call science. The same philo- element gives us words such as 'philanthropy' (loving humankind), while the soph root surfaces in 'sophisticated' and 'sophomore'. The spelling trap lives in those two unstressed Greek vowels: the 'o' after 'phil' and the 'o' before 'phy', both easy to swap or drop, plus the 'ph' spellings that the Greek letter phi always produces.

How the word is built

• philo- (loving)
• soph (wisdom)
• -y (noun-forming suffix)