Postdoctoral

How to spell postdoctoral

12 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce postdoctoral

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does postdoctoral mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to academic research or study undertaken after completing a doctorate.

Postdoctoral in a sentence

• She accepted a postdoctoral fellowship at a research institute in Berlin.

• The laboratory hired three postdoctoral researchers to run the new trials.

Where does postdoctoral come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word is a fairly modern compound built from older parts. The prefix post- comes straight from Latin, where it meant simply 'after' or 'behind', and it is the same element seen in postpone and postscript. The core is doctor, a Latin noun meaning 'teacher' or 'learned person', derived from the verb docere, 'to teach'; the academic title of doctor grew out of the idea of someone qualified to teach at the highest level. By the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as research universities expanded, the doctorate (the PhD) became the gateway to a career in scholarship, and a new stage of supervised research after earning that degree needed a label. English speakers assembled postdoctoral, meaning literally 'after the doctorate', and the spelling trap lies in remembering it is one solid word with no hyphen and the full doctoral inside it.

How the word is built

• post- (after)
• doctor (Latin doctor: teacher, learned person)
• -al (adjective suffix)