undergraduate
Americannoun
-
undergraduates
plural
adjective
-
having the standing of an undergraduate.
-
of, for, pertaining to, or characteristic of undergraduates.
noun
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Etymology
Origin of undergraduate
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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 was an undergraduate in an introductory computer-science course 30 years ago when I wrote software that ended up going “rogue” and wiping all the data from a server.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 22, 2026
They need to protect undergraduate instruction from the harmful effects of AI.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 21, 2026
He began that manuscript, which takes place on the reservation, as an undergraduate at Princeton, in Toni Morrison’s long-fiction workshop.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 20, 2026
In woodsy Hanover, N.H., the computer-science department at Dartmouth College, which has about 4,700 undergraduate students, went through its own computer-science boom time in the 2010s.
From MarketWatch ● Oct. 19, 2026
However, throughout my school and undergraduate years, my training was mainly in languages, history, and writing.
From "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" by Jared M. Diamond
Chandrasekaran and Raman met in 1999, when they were both undergraduates at Harvard University.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 23, 2026
More supervised learning for undergraduates will require new faculty to specialize in teaching, meaning that more college professors in the future will be preceptors rather than research academics.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 21, 2026
Iowa’s Grinnell College, with some 1,700 undergraduates, has also seen softening demand in the major since enrollment peaked in 2022.
From MarketWatch ● Oct. 19, 2026
Signers would cap international undergraduates at 15%, require the SAT or ACT and freeze tuition for five years.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 16, 2026
They used a group of undergraduates as subjects and gave everyone in the group one of two scrambled-sentence tests.
From "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell
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