[Vocabulary] colleague

[kite]

Dear teachers,
I am pretty confused about the meaning of colleague. I have looked up dictionaries and all said a colleague is a person of staff or who we work with. What I want to know is can colleague mean a classmate?

Thank you.

 

[Rover_KE]

No.

 

[MikeNewYork]

Dear teachers,
I am pretty confused about the meaning of colleague. I have looked up dictionaries and all said a colleague is a person of staff or who we work with. What I want to know is can colleague mean a classmate?

Thank you.

In some cases, yes. If you are in professional school (medicine, law, etc.), when you graduate, your classmates will be be your colleagues. But you are not colleagues while you are in school.

 

[Raymott]

I'd accept a more informal usage than some of my colleagues here. 'Colleague' can be used to mean a person who is engaged in an academic or business pursuit with others. I do think that classmates can be colleagues, but I wouldn't use the term unless there was a shared body of knowledge that you both knew and used for a constructive purpose. Postgraduate students working together on a project could be called colleagues. I would not use it for students who are simply learning something together. So classmates are generally not colleagues.