Seminar

How to spell seminar

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce seminar

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does seminar mean?

1. nounA meeting or class for a group to study or discuss a particular subject, usually led by an expert.

Seminar in a sentence

• The company booked a seminar on tax planning for its new managers.

• Every postgraduate student must present a paper at the weekly seminar.

Where does seminar come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes from the Latin seminarium, which literally meant a 'seed plot' or nursery garden where young plants were raised. That noun was built on semen, meaning 'seed', the same root that gives us 'semen' and 'disseminate' (to scatter seed, hence to spread ideas widely). The figurative leap from a bed of growing seeds to a place where young minds are cultivated is an old one: by the seventeenth century 'seminary' was used for a training school, especially for priests. The narrower modern sense of a small group meeting for advanced study or discussion was borrowed into English in the nineteenth century from German university practice, where the Latin form Seminar described such a class. The buried image of seeds being nurtured is a useful reminder that the word ends in -nar, not -ner.

How the word is built

• semin- (from semen: seed)
• -ar (place/relating to)