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university

nouncommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//junɪˈvɜːsəti//
  • United States//ˌjunəˈvərsədi//
  • United States//junɪˈvɝsəti//
  • United States//junɪˈvɝsɪti//

An institution of higher education that provides facilities for teaching, research, and the conferral of academic degrees across undergraduate, graduate, and often professional levels.

noun

  1. 1

    An institution of higher education that provides facilities for teaching, research, and the conferral of academic degrees across undergraduate, graduate, and often professional levels.

    She's studying mathematics at university.

    The only reason why I haven't gone to university is because I can't afford it.

    During the whole time of his abode in the university he generally spent thirteen hours of the day in study; by which assiduity besides an exact dispatch of the whole course of philosophy, he read over in a manner all classic authors that are extant[…]

    The most compelling stories of whether university is worth it are examples where a university education lifts the economic standing of a poor or disadvantaged student to a higher socioeconomic position.

  2. 2

    obsoleteThe entirety of a group; all members of a class.

    [I]t appears a pity to banish the women and children. But to this can be opposed that holy act of your Majesty which expelled the Moriscos, and the children of the Moriscos, for the reason given in the royal edict. Whenever any detestable crime is committed by any university, it is well to punish all.

Etymology

From Middle English universite (“institution of higher learning, body of persons constituting a university”) from Anglo-Norman université, from Old French universitei, from Medieval Latin stem of universitas, in juridical and Late Latin "a number of persons associated into one body, a society, company, community, guild, corporation, etc"; in Latin, "the whole, aggregate," from universus (“whole, entire”). By surface analysis, universe + -ity.

Forms

plural
universities
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).