Universities

How to spell universities

12 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce universities

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does universities mean?

1. nounMore than one institution of higher education that awards degrees and conducts research.

Universities in a sentence

• Several universities in the region offer the same engineering degree.

• Many universities now publish their research findings online for free.

Where does universities come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the plural of 'university', which comes from the Latin universitas, meaning a 'whole' or a 'community taken as one body'. That noun was built on universus, literally 'turned into one', combining unus 'one' with vertere 'to turn', so the underlying image is of many parts turned together into a single whole. In medieval Latin the phrase universitas magistrorum et scholarium described a guild of masters and students banded together as one corporate body, and from that the word narrowed to the institution of higher learning we know today. English adopted it through Old French université in the 1300s, around the time the great teaching centres at Oxford and Paris were taking shape. The spelling trap in the plural is the soft middle: the unstressed '-ver-' and the change of '-ty' to '-ties', since the 'y' becomes 'i' before the plural ending.

How the word is built

• uni- (one)
• vers (from vertere: to turn)
• -ity (noun-forming suffix)
• -es (plural)