Scholar means an academic or researcher, most often in the humanities: a historian, a linguist or an expert in law (a Shakespeare scholar). A second, less common meaning is a student who has won a scholarship. The word looks like school, but it doesn't mean a schoolchild: a child at school is a pupil in Britain, or a student.
scholar: will you get the meaning right?
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a scholar of + subject/period; a Shakespeare/Tolstoy + scholar; a legal/classical + scholar; a visiting scholar (at + university)
- She is a respected scholar of medieval history and has written five books on the subject.
- Shakespeare scholars still disagree about the exact year some of his plays were written.
- A visiting scholar from Seoul gave a fascinating talk about modern Korean poetry.
What changed
First versionAll the scholars at my daughter's school wear a dark green uniform.
RevisionAll the pupils at my daughter's school wear a dark green uniform.
The sentence is about children who go to school. In British English they are called pupils, and in American English students. A scholar is an adult researcher, so the sentence sounds as if the school is attended only by academics in green uniforms.
The English word for a person who does research depends on the field. A scientist is a physicist, biologist or chemist: a climate scientist. A scholar is a historian, linguist or philosopher. Researcher works for any field, and an academic is someone who teaches and does research at a university: Her father is an academic in Manchester.
Your turn
Professor Kim is a well-known ___ of ancient Greek philosophy who has taught at Oxford for thirty years.
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scholar — Philosophy is one of the humanities, and an expert in ancient Greek philosophy is called a scholar. A scientist works in the natural sciences, for example as a chemist or physicist, and the word doesn't fit a philosopher.
Think of a book or lecture by a historian, linguist or other humanities scholar. Write what this person studies and what their work was about.
Last year I read a book by a scholar of Russian history about how people in Moscow lived in the 1920s.
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