interdisciplinary
Americanadjective
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combining or involving two or more academic disciplines or fields of study.
The economics and history departments are offering an interdisciplinary seminar on Asia.
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combining or involving two or more professions, technologies, departments, or the like, as in business or industry.
adjective
Etymology
Origin of interdisciplinary
First recorded in 1935–40; inter- ( def. ) + disciplinary ( def. )
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How does interdisciplinary compare to similar and commonly confused words? Explore the most common comparisons:
Explanation
Something that's interdisciplinary covers more than one field of study. If you take an interdisciplinary science and literature class, you might read a science fiction novel and then explore the scientific ideas behind it. The word interdisciplinary can be broken into its parts: inter-, which means "between" in Latin, and disciplinary, which is from the Latin disciplina and means teaching or knowledge. Interdisciplinary means between fields, but they don't have to be unrelated disciplines. You can do interdisciplinary work between two sciences, for example. An interdisciplinary conference on biology and computer science might include workshops on both fields.
Vocabulary lists containing interdisciplinary
Words with 15 or More Letters, List 5
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Warrior Girl Unearthed
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Drama High
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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.
Karunarathna Koralalage, Rahman and Saito modified a commodity polymer, called S-Bpin, with assistance from Natasha Ghezawi, a graduate student at the Bredesen Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Graduate Education of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
From Science Daily • Feb. 8, 2024
ALife’s unofficial kickoff came in 1987 at the first Interdisciplinary Workshop on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the field gained the legitimacy of a name.
From Scientific American • Apr. 6, 2023
The Ayotzinapa case became a major embarrassment for Peña Nieto, who agreed to a probe by the team known as the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts.
From Washington Post • Mar. 31, 2023
Irene Bloemraad is the faculty director of the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative and a sociology professor at UC Berkeley, where Ethan Roubenoff is a doctoral candidate in demography.
From Los Angeles Times • Feb. 26, 2023
Unfortunately, there are four hours between when I arrive at school and the Social Studies and Science Interdisciplinary Block.
From "The Benefits of Being an Octopus" by Ann Braden
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.
