lycée

American  

[lee-sey] / liˈseɪ /

noun

lycées plural

1. a secondary school, especially in France, maintained by the government.

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lycée British  

/ lise, ˈliːseɪ /

noun

1. a secondary school

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Other Word Forms

Inflected Forms

noun

• lycées
  plural

Etymology

Origin of lycée

1860–65; < French < Latin lycēum lyceum

Explanation

A lycee is a high school, particularly one where French is spoken. Before you enroll at the Sorbonne, you need to graduate from your lycee! In France, the lycee (or in French, lycée) is the final part of a student's secondary, pre-college education. Generally this means grades 9 through 12, or the equivalent of high school in the U.S. If you attend an American lycee, it is usually a French immersion school, or one that mixes the use of English and French. Lycee derives from the Greek lykeion, an ancient Athenian grove where Aristotle taught.

Example Sentences

Lili is spending a year teaching at a local lycée before going to graduate school.

From New York Times • Apr. 8, 2022

He landed in Beirut, Lebanon, with a teacher’s letter of introduction to the Collège Arménien, a lycée founded in 1928 to educate Armenian refugees.

From New York Times • Apr. 16, 2021

Lie With Me, which was a No 1 bestseller in France, follows a first love between two teenage boys, Besson and Thomas Andrieux, a fellow pupil at his lycée in the Charente in south-west France.

From The Guardian • Aug. 18, 2019

Her father was a university professor and Lagarde – who has three younger brothers – grew up in a disciplined yet loving environment, studying at the lycée in Le Havre.

From Slate • Dec. 10, 2011

Explain how the terms college, lycée, gymnasium, academy, and grammar school all came to be employed, in different countries, to designate about the same type of secondary school.

From The History of Education; educational practice and progress considered as a phase of the development and spread of western civilization by Cubberley, Ellwood Patterson