Professor

How to spell professor

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce professor

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does professor mean?

1. nounA senior academic who teaches and conducts research at a university or college.

Professor in a sentence

• The professor marked the final-year dissertations over the weekend.

• A visiting professor from Berlin gave the keynote lecture on economics.

Where does professor come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes from the Latin professor, meaning 'one who publicly declares or claims expertise', built on the verb profiteri 'to declare openly', itself a combination of pro- 'forth, in public' and fateri 'to confess or acknowledge'. In the ancient world a professor was literally a person who professed, that is, someone who publicly proclaimed a skill or branch of learning, and from there it narrowed to a public teacher of a subject. English took the word in the late 1300s, originally meaning a person who professes a faith or art, and by the 1500s it had settled into its modern sense of a senior university teacher. The same fateri root underlies 'confess' and 'profession', and that shared family explains the double s in the middle. The classic spelling trap is that the prefix keeps a single f while the root delivers the doubled s, and the ending is the Latin agent suffix -or rather than -er.

How the word is built

• pro- (forth, publicly)
• fess (declare, from Latin fateri 'to confess, acknowledge')
• -or (agent-noun suffix: one who)