undergraduate
Americannoun
-
undergraduates
plural
adjective
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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
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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:
News relied on was several years old and that the amount of federal debt undergraduate students carry doesn’t vary much because the government limits the amount they can borrow, Kelchen said.
From MarketWatch ● Sep. 22, 2026
Co-founders Conner Galloway and Alexander Valys met in 2004 as undergraduate roommates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 10, 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
Former Ohio State undergraduate Carmen Pape was also a co-author.
From Science Daily ● Aug. 31, 2026
He was an undergraduate at Delhi University during the euphoria of 1957, when the Communists won the State Assembly elections and Nehru invited them to form a government.
From "The God of Small Things" by Arundhati Roy
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
A report this spring by the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance suggested they made up more than 20% of Harvard undergraduates in the 1990s and about 7% now.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 11, 2026
Full-time undergraduates normally resident in Wales are entitled to at least £1,000, external, rising to £1,020 in 2026-27.
From BBC ● Aug. 10, 2026
It’s now flooded with standardized public-market data, so much so that undergraduates can readily peer inside and participate on nearly equal footing.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 3, 2026
Like many other poor students at the time, Hooke also helped to make ends meet by working as servant to one of the wealthier undergraduates.
From "The Scientists" by John Gribbin
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.
