humanities
noun
Form of humanity , plural of humanity.
Simple meaning
The study of language, literature, the arts, history, and philosophy, sometimes including religion.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
hyoomanihteezSay the bold part a little louder.
IPA pronunciation (US)
hjuˈmænɪtiz
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
The study of language, literature, the arts, history, and philosophy, sometimes including religion.
Word at a Glance
- Difficulty
- B1 · Intermediate (estimated)
- Frequency
- Common
- Typical Use
- General English
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
Aura for this meaning
This meaning: The study of language, literature, the arts, history, and philosophy, sometimes including religion.
Used this way, humanities is a reasonably familiar word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. This is a religious use: it carries the weight of tradition and ceremony.
- Emotional tone
- Neutral
- Formality
- Neutral
- Intensity
- Not strongly marked
- How common
- Moderately common
- Connotation
- Matter-of-fact
- Usage feel
- Neutral and straightforward
Where it naturally appears
- Religion/spirituality
- Historical writing
- Literature/storytelling
- Academic writing
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.
Inflected forms
Grammatical variations of the same word.
The quality of being humane.
Compound terms
Established multiword terms.
An honorary degree in the humanities.
More about this wordSynonyms, forms, origin
Synonyms
Sense: study of language or literature or the arts
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Words can change meaning depending on context.
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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.