Schema

How to spell schema

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce schema

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does schema mean?

1. nounAn organised mental or conceptual framework that represents how knowledge or ideas are structured.
2. nounA formal definition of how data is organised in a database, including its tables, fields, and relationships.

Schema in a sentence

• The textbook presents a clear schema for classifying the regions.

• The developer updated the database schema to add a new column for phone numbers.

• Each new fact had to fit into the schema she already held about the topic.

• Every record must conform to the schema before it is saved.

Where does schema come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word comes almost unchanged from the Greek skhema, which meant 'form', 'shape', or 'figure', and which itself grew from the verb ekhein, meaning 'to have' or 'to hold', in the sense of how something holds or presents itself. Latin borrowed it as schema with the same idea of a shape or outline, and from there it passed into scholarly English in the late 1500s. For a long time it lived mainly in rhetoric and logic, describing the figure or pattern of an argument. In the twentieth century psychology and then computing seized on it for an organising framework of ideas or a formal description of how data is structured. The retained Greek 'sch' spelling, pronounced like a hard k, is exactly the trap: it looks as if it should sound soft, and the close cousin 'scheme' tempts writers toward the wrong ending.

How the word is built

• schema (from Greek skhema: form, shape, figure)