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scholar

nouncommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈskɒlə//
  • United States//ˈskɑlɚ//

A student; one who studies at school or college, typically having a scholarship.

noun

  1. 1

    A student; one who studies at school or college, typically having a scholarship.

  2. 2

    A specialist in a particular branch of knowledge.

  3. 3

    A learned person; a bookman.

    The ability of a segment of a glass sphere to magnify whatever is placed before it was known around the year 1000, when the spherical segment was called a reading stone,[…]. Scribes, illuminators, and scholars held such stones directly over manuscript pages as an aid in seeing what was being written, drawn, or read.

  4. 4

    Someone who received a prestigious scholarship.

Etymology

From Middle English scolar, scolare, scoler, scolere (also scholer), from Old English scōlere (“scholar, learner”), from Late Latin scholāris, from schola (“school”), from Ancient Greek σχολή (skholḗ, “spare time, leisure", later, "conversations and the knowledge gained through them during free time; the places where these conversations took place”), equivalent to school + -ar. Doublet of schooler, Schuyler, and escolar. Compare Saterland Frisian Sköiler, Middle Low German schö̂lære, schö̂lere, schö̂ler (> modern German Low German Schöler), Dutch scholier, German Schüler.

Forms

plural
scholars
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).