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semester

nouncommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//sɪˈmɛstə//
  • United States//sɪˈmɛstɚ//

Half of a school year (US) or academic year such as autumn or spring semester.

noun

  1. 1

    Half of a school year (US) or academic year such as autumn or spring semester.

    I will graduate at the end of the spring semester.

  2. 2

    A period or term of six months.

Etymology

From German Semester, from New Latin sēmestris (“lasting six months”), from sex (“six”) + mēnsis (“month”).

Forms

plural
semesters
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).