disciple
noun · verb
Simple meaning
Someone who believes and helps to spread the doctrine of another.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
dihsypuhlSay the bold part a little louder.
IPA pronunciation (US)
dɪˈsaɪpəl
This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.
IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.
Definition
Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.
noun
Someone who believes and helps to spread the doctrine of another
“As a devoted disciple, she traveled widely to spread her teacher's philosophy.”
A person who learns from another, especially one who then teaches others.
An active follower or adherent of someone, or some philosophy etc.
One of the twelve disciples of Jesus sent out as Apostles.
A member of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), a mainline Protestant Christian denomination in the United States and Canada.
Any of the followers of Jesus Christ.
verb
religiontransitive
To train, educate, teach.
Word at a Glance
- Difficulty
- C1 · Advanced
- Frequency
- Uncommon
- Typical Use
- Neutral / general English
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
Aura for this meaning
This meaning: Someone who believes and helps to spread the doctrine of another
Used this way, disciple is a common word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. It usually sounds natural in a wide range of settings.
“As a devoted disciple, she traveled widely to spread her teacher's philosophy.”
- Emotional tone
- Neutral
- Formality
- Neutral
- Intensity
- Not strongly marked
- How common
- Common
- Connotation
- Matter-of-fact
- Usage feel
- Neutral and straightforward
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
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Common Patterns and Combinations
How this word naturally appears with others.
Word Family
Related forms, grouped by how they connect.
Compound terms
Established multiword terms.
A Protestant church that accepts the Bible as the only source of true Christian faith and practices baptism by immersion.
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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.