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.
Maybe, as a few of my younger, smarter colleagues theorized, it’s the phones, which are omnipresent among Olympians, and make their rabbit ears overly attuned to the surrounding chatter.
“I pray to God every day that things will change for the better,” said Joel José León Santo, 53, who on a recent morning was preparing his fishing boat with three colleagues.
From Los Angeles Times
In a study my colleagues and I conducted last year, we used a social media model to simulate swarms of inauthentic social media accounts using different tactics to influence a target online community.
From Salon
For Jetton and his colleagues, the fight rarely enters the public eye, but is vital to global security.
From Barron's
They used the drone to illuminate the site and transmit video to colleagues so they could see the diver was safe.
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.
