liberal arts
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liberal arts
pl.n.
1. Academic disciplines, including literature, history, languages, philosophy, mathematics, and general sciences, viewed in contrast to professional and technical disciplines.
2. The disciplines comprising the trivium and quadrivium.
[Middle English, translation of Medieval Latin artēs liberālēs, the trivium and quadrivium : Latin artēs, pl. of ars, subject of study + līberālēs, pl. of līberālis, proper to free persons.]
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
liberal arts
pl n
(Education) the fine arts, humanities, sociology, languages, and literature. Often shortened to: arts
Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014
lib′eral arts′
n.pl.
1. academic college courses providing general knowledge and comprising the arts, humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences.
2. (during the Middle Ages) studies comprising the quadrivium and trivium.
[1745–55; translation of Latin artēs līberālēs works befitting a free man]
Random House Kernerman Webster's College Dictionary, © 2010 K Dictionaries Ltd. Copyright 2005, 1997, 1991 by Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.
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Noun | 1. | ![]() discipline, field of study, subject area, subject field, bailiwick, subject, field, study - a branch of knowledge; "in what discipline is his doctorate?"; "teachers should be well trained in their subject"; "anthropology is the study of human beings" neoclassicism - revival of a classical style (in art or literature or architecture or music) but from a new perspective or with a new motivation classicalism, classicism - a movement in literature and art during the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe that favored rationality and restraint and strict forms; "classicism often derived its models from the ancient Greeks and Romans" Romantic Movement, Romanticism - a movement in literature and art during the late 18th and early 19th centuries that celebrated nature rather than civilization; "Romanticism valued imagination and emotion over rationality" English - the discipline that studies the English language and literature history - the discipline that records and interprets past events involving human beings; "he teaches Medieval history"; "history takes the long view" art history - the academic discipline that studies the development of painting and sculpture chronology - the determination of the actual temporal sequence of past events beaux arts, fine arts - the study and creation of visual works of art performing arts - arts or skills that require public performance Occidentalism - the scholarly knowledge of western cultures and languages and people Oriental Studies, Orientalism - the scholarly knowledge of Asian cultures and languages and people philosophy - the rational investigation of questions about existence and knowledge and ethics literary study - the humanistic study of literature library science - the study of the principles and practices of library administration philology, linguistics - the humanistic study of language and literature musicology - the scholarly and scientific study of music Sinology - the study of Chinese history and language and culture stemmatics, stemmatology - the humanistic discipline that attempts to reconstruct the transmission of a text (especially a text in manuscript form) on the basis of relations between the various surviving manuscripts (sometimes using cladistic analysis); "stemmatology also plays an important role in musicology"; "transcription errors are of decisive importance in stemmatics" trivium - (Middle Ages) an introductory curriculum at a medieval university involving grammar and logic and rhetoric; considered to be a triple way to eloquence quadrivium - (Middle Ages) a higher division of the curriculum in a medieval university involving arithmetic and music and geometry and astronomy |
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