Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • adjective Of or relating to schools; academic.
  • adjective Of, relating to, or characteristic of Scholasticism.
  • adjective Overly subtle or pedantic.
  • noun A Scholastic philosopher or theologian.
  • noun A dogmatist or pedant.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Pertaining to or suiting a scholar, school, or schools; like or characteristic of a scholar: as, a scholastic manner; scholastic phrases.
  • Of, pertaining to, or concerned with schooling or education; educational: as, a scholastic institution; a scholastic appointment.
  • Pertaining to or characteristic of scholasticism or the schoolmen; according to the methods of the Christian Aristotelians of the middle ages. See scholasticism.
  • Coldly intellectual and unemotional; characterized by excessive intellectual subtlety or by punctilious and dogmatic distinctions; formal; pedantic: said especially of the discussion of religious truth.
  • noun A student or studious person; a scholar.
  • noun A schoolman; a Christian Aristotelian; one of those who taught in European schools from the eleventh century to the Reformation, who reposed ultimately upon authority for every philosophical proposition, and who wrote chiefly in the form of disputations, discussing the questions with an almost syllogistic stiffness: opposed to Biblicist.
  • noun One who deals with religious questions in the spirit of the medieval scholastics.
  • noun A member of the third grade in the organization of the Jesuits.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective Pertaining to, or suiting, a scholar, a school, or schools; scholarlike.
  • adjective Of or pertaining to the schoolmen and divines of the Middle Ages (see Schoolman).
  • adjective Hence, characterized by excessive subtilty, or needlessly minute subdivisions; pedantic; formal.
  • noun One who adheres to the method or subtilties of the schools.
  • noun (R. C. Ch.) See the Note under Jesuit.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun philosophy a member of the medieval philosophical school of scholasticism; a medieval Christian Aristotelian
  • adjective Of or relating to school; academic
  • adjective philosophy Of or relating to the philosophical tradition of scholasticism

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • adjective of or relating to schools
  • noun a person who pays more attention to formal rules and book learning than they merit
  • adjective of or relating to the philosophical doctrine of scholasticism
  • noun a Scholastic philosopher or theologian

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Latin scholasticus, from Greek skholastikos, learned, studious, from skholazein, to study, from skholē, school; see segh- in Indo-European roots.]

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