Tutorial

How to spell tutorial

8 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce tutorial

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does tutorial mean?

1. nounA session of close instruction, either an academic class with a small group or a step-by-step guide for learning a task.
2. adjectiveRelating to a tutor or to private or small-group teaching.

Tutorial in a sentence

• noun

  The online tutorial walked her through installing the software.

• adjective

  The college runs on a tutorial system rather than large lectures.

• noun

  Each tutorial met for an hour with only four students and one lecturer.

• adjective

  The software offers a tutorial mode that explains each feature.

Where does tutorial come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin tutor, meaning 'guardian' or 'watcher', which itself grew from the verb tueri, 'to watch over, protect, or look after'. In Roman usage a tutor was literally someone who guarded a person or their interests, and only later did the sense narrow toward guarding a young person's education. English adopted tutor in the late Middle Ages for a private teacher, and the adjective tutorial, 'relating to a tutor', appeared by the seventeenth century with the suffix -ial added on the Latin pattern. By the nineteenth century, especially in British universities, tutorial had hardened into a noun for a small teaching session led by a tutor. The same protective root survives in the modern words 'tuition' and 'intuition', and the spelling trap lies in remembering the -ial ending rather than a plain -al.

How the word is built

• tutor (from Latin tutor: guardian, teacher)
• -ial (adjective/noun suffix)