colleague
Americannoun
noun
Usage
What does colleague mean? A colleague is someone you work with or someone who’s in the same profession as you, especially a peer within that profession.Colleague can be a synonym for coworker, which is someone who has the same employer as you. But it also used to refer to people who have different employers but who work in the same or a very similar profession, especially when they regularly interact or share knowledge. For example, two medical researchers who work for different universities but who collaborate to publish research findings would be called colleagues.Example: Sarah has received an outpouring of support from her fellow attorneys at the firm as well as many of her colleagues in the legal community.
Other Word Forms
- colleagueship noun
Etymology
Origin of colleague
First recorded in 1515–25; from Middle French collegue, from Latin collēga, equivalent to col- “with, together” ( col- 1 ) + -lēga, derivative of legere “to choose, gather”
Compare meaning
How does colleague compare to similar and commonly confused words? Explore the most common comparisons:
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
But he urged colleagues not to "drop the pilot" 18 months after Labour's return to power, arguing it would not "solve the country's problems".
From BBC
"We did not know about the strange disease causing our colleagues to die," said Evans Omondi, 34, who travelled hundreds of miles from western Kenya to work at the quarry.
From Barron's
For more than ten years, Jeffrey Shaman and colleagues, including Sen Pei, have worked to improve methods for tracking and simulating the spread of infectious diseases such as influenza and COVID-19.
From Science Daily
After he saves the day, and his Daily Planet colleagues remark on Superman’s skills, his alter ego Clark Kent gives a sly glance to the camera, letting the audience in on the, quite obvious, ruse.
There’s no way I can top Friday’s account by my colleagues Joshua Robinson and Ben Cohen:
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
