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professor

nouncommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//pɹəˈfɛs.ə//

The most senior rank for an academic at a university or similar institution.

noun

  1. 1

    The most senior rank for an academic at a university or similar institution.

    Professor is what you become after teaching for twenty to thirty years.

  2. 2

    informalA teacher or faculty member at a college or university regardless of formal rank.

  3. 3

    archaicOne who professes something, such as a religious doctrine.

    […] I alvvayes thought / It vvas both impious and vnnaturall, / That ſuch immanity and bloody ſtrife / Should reigne among Profeſſors of one Faith.

    As for Religion, I have not said, much lesse meant irreverently of it, or of the Professors thereof.

    This period in which Abraham the Jew lived was one in which Magic was almost universally believed in, and in which its Professors were held in honour;

  4. 4

    obsoleteA practitioner, one who (publicly) practises or teaches an art or skill.

  5. 5

    slangA pianist in a saloon, brothel, etc.

    You could hear […] pianos under the hands of whorehouse professors sounding like they came with keys between the keys.

  6. 6

    The puppeteer who performs a Punch and Judy show; a Punchman.

Etymology

From Middle English professor, professour, from Anglo-Norman proffessur and its etymon Latin professor (“declarer, person who claims knowledge”), from the past participle stem of profiteor (“profess”). By surface analysis, profess + -or.

Forms

plural
professors
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).