It’s that time of year when students are going back to school…and I’ve featured school on here several times. But upon dropping my daughter off at college two weeks ago, I realized that I’ve never actually looked up the word. So today, let’s see where college comes from.

Our English word dates from the late 1300s, taken from French which in turn came from Latin. So what does the root collegium mean in Latin? It actually has nothing to do with education, per se. It means “community, society, or guild.” It’s literally “an association of partners,” from com (“with” or “together”) + leg (from legare, “to choose”).

The French word meant a “collegiate body,” which could be used for any group and is still preserved in English with things like the U.S. electoral college or the Vatican’s college of cardinals. Its original meaning was just any “organized association of people invested with powers and rights to engage in a common duty or pursuit.” The most common examples, however, were in religious and educational life.

So let’s focus on the educational. The term was used to refer to the “body of scholars within an endowed institution of learning.” Not the institution itself. It wasn’t until around the year 1800, in fact, that the word began to be used to refer not to the body of scholars within a university, but to a degree-giving educational institution itself. Even today, most universities have several colleges within them, often denoted as “school of…”. 

When I was a tour guide for St. John’s College, not to be confused with St. John’s University, I often had to explain that we used the word college to describe ourselves instead of university because we are truly one body of scholars, all pursuing the same program of study and degree.

Next week, we’ll take a look at the word university!

Word Nerds Merch!