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intern

noun · verb

Simple meaning

An advanced student or graduate in medicine gaining supervised practical experience.

Pronunciation

Say it like this:

intern

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US device voice
IPA pronunciation (US)

ˈɪntɚn

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.

Word Review

Definition

Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.

noun

  1. An advanced student or graduate in medicine gaining supervised practical experience (`houseman' is a British term)

  2. A student or recent graduate who works in order to gain experience in their chosen field.

  3. A medical student or recent graduate working in a hospital as a final part of medical training.

  4. A person who is interned, forcibly or voluntarily.

verb

  1. intransitive

    To work as an intern, usually with little or no pay or other legal prerogatives of employment, and for the purpose of furthering a program of education.

    “The young doctor is interning at the Medical Center this year.”

  2. transitive

    To imprison somebody, usually without trial.

Word at a Glance

Difficulty
B2 · Upper Intermediate (estimated)
Frequency
Moderately Common
Typical Use
Neutral / general English

Word Aura™

How this word commonly comes across.

Aura for this meaning

This meaning: An advanced student or graduate in medicine gaining supervised practical experience (`houseman' is a British term)

Used this way, intern is a specialist word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. This is a clinical use: it belongs to medical description, where it is factual rather than emotive.

Emotional tone
Neutral
Formality
Specialist/technical
Intensity
Not strongly marked
How common
Specialized
Connotation
Clinical and technical
Usage feel
Technical and specialized

Where it naturally appears

  • Medicine/healthcare
  • Science
  • Technical/specialist writing
  • Education/classroom

Usage note

In general conversation this sense usually needs explaining — outside its field, people reach for a plainer word.

Nearby words

  • internist , a specialist term, precise but narrower

Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.

More ways to use intern

  • “During WW II, Japanese were interned in camps in the West.”verb

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Common Patterns and Combinations

How this word naturally appears with others.

Advanced / student

gen internstudent intern

Work

intern medintern program

Other combinations

arch internsummer internhouse internyoung intern

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Word Family

Related forms, grouped by how they connect.

Word family

Words built from the same root.

  • internshipnounDerived noun

    The position of a medical intern.

  • internmentnounDerived noun · specialist

    Confinement during wartime.

  • internaladjectiveDerived adjective

    Happening or arising or located within some limits or especially surface.

  • internallyadverbDerived adverb

    On or from the inside.

Related Words

Connected to the same idea, not synonyms.

More about this wordSynonyms, forms, origin

Synonyms

Sense: advanced student

housemaninternistTechnical

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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.