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
The long-suffering younger Forster described his father, in an understatement, as having “a tendency toward self-love, pride, and a certain scholarly vanity.”
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 12, 2026
As in postpublication peer review, a Peer Review article may address a paper from any scholarly journal so long as it raises concerns about methods, evidence, logic, definitions or theory.
From The Wall Street Journal ● May 27, 2026
The National Endowment for the Humanities was established by Congress in 1965 to fund scholarly and cultural work across the country.
From Slate ● May 14, 2026
Musicologists love to wax on about the ambitious first movement of the Eroica symphony, mainly because it is unusually long and complex, and provides fuel for seemingly endless analysis and scholarly scrutiny.
From "The Story of Music" by Howard Goodall
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.
