faculty
pronunciation
How to pronounce faculty in British English:
UK [ˈfæklti]
How to pronounce faculty in American English:
US [ˈfæklti]
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- Noun:
- one of the inherent cognitive or perceptual powers of the mind
- the body of teachers and administrators at a school
Word Origin
- faculty
- faculty: [14] If one has a faculty for doing something, one finds it ‘easy’ to do. The word comes, via Old French faculte, from Latin facultās. This was a parallel form to facilitās (source of English facility [15]). Both were derived from Latin facilis ‘easy’ (whence English facile [15]), an adjective formed from the verb facere ‘do’. Since facilitās more closely resembled facilis, it retained its connotations of ‘easiness’, whereas by the classical period facultās had more or less lost them, coming to mean ‘capability, power’.=> facile, facility
- faculty (n.)
- late 14c., "ability, opportunity, means, resources," from Old French faculte "skill, accomplishment, learning" (14c., Modern French faculté) and directly from Latin facultatem (nominative facultas) "power, ability, capability, opportunity; sufficient number, abundance, wealth," from *facli-tat-s, from facilis (see facile). Academic sense "branch of knowledge" (late 14c.) was in Old French and probably was the earliest in English (it is attested in Anglo-Latin from late 12c.), on notion of "ability in knowledge" or "body of persons on whom are conferred specific professional powers." Originally each department was a faculty; the use in reference to the whole teaching staff of an entire college dates from 1767. Related: Facultative. The Latin words facultas and facilitas "were originally different forms of the same word; the latter, owing to its more obvious relationship to the adj., retained the primary sense of 'easiness', which the former had ceased to have before the classical period." [OED]
Example
- 1. He was on the economics faculty at the university of toronto , and holds a phd in economics from harvard university .
- 2. Research into this method began five years ago , when faculty members started discussing the concept casually .
- 3. In short , language is not just our most human faculty .
- 4. Stanford 's entailed increasing the faculty by 10-15 % .
- 5. Fixing higher education isn 't easy , as any college president who has locked horns with faculty will attest .