Schoolboy

How to spell schoolboy

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce schoolboy

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does schoolboy mean?

1. nounA boy who attends school.

Schoolboy in a sentence

• The schoolboy raised his hand to answer the teacher's question.

• Every schoolboy in the class had to wear the same grey uniform.

Where does schoolboy come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent English compound, simply joining 'school' and 'boy', and it has been recorded in writing since the late 1500s. The first element, 'school', came into Old English as 'scol' from the Latin 'schola', meaning a place of learning or leisure for study, which the Romans in turn borrowed from the Greek 'skhole'; remarkably, that Greek word originally meant 'leisure' or 'free time', since serious discussion was a pursuit of those at ease. The second element, 'boy', is a humbler word of uncertain medieval English origin, first used for a male servant or knave before it settled into its modern sense of a young male child. Put together, the compound names a boy who attends school, and it later took on a flavour of youthful, immature, or mischievous behaviour, as in 'schoolboy humour'. The spelling is straightforward once you remember the doubled 'o' inherited from 'school' and that the two words fuse into one solid word with no hyphen.

How the word is built

• school (place of learning)
• boy (male child)