undergraduate
Americannoun
-
undergraduates
plural
adjective
-
having the standing of an undergraduate.
-
of, for, pertaining to, or characteristic of undergraduates.
noun
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of undergraduate
Compare meaning
How does undergraduate compare to similar and commonly confused words? Explore the most common comparisons:
Explanation
An undergraduate is a college or university student who's not a graduate student. After high school, you can become an undergraduate. Undergraduates are students of universities and colleges: they've graduated from high school and have been accepted to college, but they haven't graduated yet. If the under in undergraduate seems confusing, that's because there are also graduate students, students who have a college degree but are no longer undergraduates and are pursuing an advanced degree, like a Master's or Ph.D. Lots of people say being an undergraduate was one of the best times of their lives: it's an exciting thing to be.
Vocabulary lists containing undergraduate
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.
See Examples For:
"I've always been excited about fabrics and textiles, and what we can engineer and build with them," said Mahadevan, who began working in Bertoldi's lab as an undergraduate.
From Science Daily ● Sep. 4, 2026
Why buy: After finishing his undergraduate degree in Boston, Snyder moved back to Louisville in 2021 and decided to buy his primary home to start building equity.
From MarketWatch ● Sep. 1, 2026
He is still involved in his ownership of sports teams and focused on trying to bring an NBA championship back to Philadelphia for the first time since 1983, when he was a Wharton undergraduate.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 29, 2026
Neither Stanford nor UC Berkeley, the state’s two biggest computer science powers, has created an undergraduate AI degree.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 27, 2026
The student next to me said he’d studied Isaiah Berlin at Oxford; the other said he’d already heard this lecturer’s remarks on Berlin when he was an undergraduate at Cambridge.
From "Educated" by Tara Westover
With help from Berkeley undergraduates, Vazquez traveled throughout the region, setting up mist nets over streams, ponds and rivers at night.
From Science Daily ● Sep. 12, 2026
Professors remember him as one of the most brilliant undergraduates they ever met.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 26, 2026
While there had been a "significant drop in international students" - who are largely postgraduates, and who pay higher fees - Hillman said universities were utilising their resources for UK undergraduates instead.
From BBC ● Aug. 13, 2026
UC is outpacing that, and says it is on track to reach its goal of enrolling 217,000 California resident undergraduates by 2030.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 29, 2026
Just 8 percent of undergraduates in 2004 came from families in the bottom half of the income distribution, down from 11 percent a decade earlier.
From "Class Matters" by The New York Times
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.
