School

How to spell school

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce school

What does school mean?

1. nounAn institution where children or students are taught.
2. nounA large group of fish or marine animals swimming together.

School in a sentence

• She walks to school every morning.

• A school of herring scattered when the dolphins approached.

• School starts at nine every morning.

• Divers filmed a shimmering school of mackerel near the reef.

Where does school come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word traces back to the Greek skhole, which originally meant 'leisure' or 'free time', specifically the kind of free time a person could spend on learning and philosophical discussion. Over time the Greeks shifted the sense from the leisure itself to the place where such discussion happened, then to the gathering of pupils. Latin borrowed it as schola, and it passed into Old English as scol before being reshaped by the Latin and Old French spelling that gave us the modern 'sch-' opening. The surprising original meaning, that learning was the proper use of leisure, is a neat reminder of how the educated classes viewed study. The separate sense of 'school' for a group of fish comes from a different source entirely, the Dutch and Middle Low German word schole meaning 'a troop or crowd', which is why the two senses sound identical but have unrelated roots.

How the word is built

• school (from Greek skhole: leisure, learned discussion, then a place of learning)