Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of scholarly
Explanation
Someone who's scholarly is a serious student. You can describe your studious friend who's always working on a research paper or reading a huge book as scholarly. Use the adjective scholarly when you talk about a person who is focused on learning — in other words, a scholar. You can also describe things that relate to studying or knowledge as scholarly, like a scholarly article in a journal or a scholarly atmosphere in a library. The Old English word scolere, or "student," is the root of both scholar and scholarly, from the Latin word for school, schola.
Vocabulary lists containing scholarly
Chapter 1: What Does a Historian Do?
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Words to Describe a Teacher
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Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
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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.
They policed their own house, enforcing norms of truth-seeking, maintaining scholarly integrity and rigor, and ensuring that students emerged with basic knowledge, employable skills and civic competency.
From The Wall Street Journal • Jun. 21, 2026
He is writing for a general rather than a scholarly audience, so he does not much bother with the debates among historians about these two giants.
From The Wall Street Journal • Jun. 5, 2026
Applications go first to peer experts, who evaluate scholarly merit.
From Slate • May 14, 2026
Eugene Levert, chain-smoking next to a stack of books while wearing a vertical blue-striped button-down and khaki slacks, looked the scholarly mirror of Doug Lamplugh, in a horizontal blue-striped polo and khaki shorts.
From Slate • May 4, 2026
Unfortunately, nothing would have survived from such an encounter except, at best, a few fossilised bones and a handful of stone tools that remain mute under the most intense scholarly inquisitions.
From "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" by Yuval Noah Harari
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.
