Scholar

How to spell scholar

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce scholar

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does scholar mean?

1. nounA person with deep knowledge of a subject, often through academic study.
2. nounA student holding a scholarship or place of study granted on merit.

Scholar in a sentence

• The visiting scholar spent decades studying medieval manuscripts.

• He won a place as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford.

• As a respected scholar of Roman law, she advised the committee.

• Each scholar receives full tuition and a living stipend.

Where does scholar come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word traces back to the Greek skhole, which surprisingly meant 'leisure' or 'spare time', the very condition that allowed free citizens to spend hours in learned discussion. From that idea of leisured study, skhole came to mean a lecture or a place of learning, and Latin borrowed it as schola, the source of our 'school'. The agent noun scholaris, 'one who belongs to a school', then described a learner or student. English took it in during the Old English and early Middle English period, partly through Latin and partly reinforced by Old French escoler, and over time the sense narrowed to a deeply learned person or a holder of a scholarship. The tricky spelling comes straight from that Greek and Latin ancestry: the silent 'c' in the 'sch' cluster echoes Greek skh, and the ending is the Latin agent '-ar' rather than the more common '-er'.

How the word is built

• schol- (from Greek skhole: leisure, then learning/school)
• -ar (agent suffix: one who)