curriculum
Pluralcurricula, curriculums
- 1The full range of classes, assigned work, and subject matter offered by a school or university.
The university revised its curriculum to include more lab-based courses.
Teachers spent the summer redesigning the math curriculum for ninth graders.
Similarsyllabus, program, coursework
Note
In American English the word names what a particular institution offers. A university revises its curriculum, and a school district may choose from a menu of curriculums. Elsewhere the weight falls on the mandated national standards. Both plurals are correct: the Latin curricula and the anglicized curriculums. In speech or writing you can use either without being wrong.
- 2The prescribed body of knowledge and skills, often set nationally, that every school must cover with all its pupils.
The government updated the national curriculum to include financial literacy.
Schools across the country must teach the curriculum to every pupil.
Note
Here the curriculum is set above the school rather than chosen by it: a body of standards every pupil must be taught. Because it belongs to a whole system, it invites comparison between countries, and researchers speak of benchmarked curricula. This is the British, Canadian and Australian emphasis, the counterpart of the American sense of course offerings.
- 3A racecourse, or any place laid out for running.
Spectators gathered at the curriculum to watch the chariots race at dawn.
The young men trained each morning on the curriculum near the river.
Note
The oldest and most literal meaning. Latin curriculum was a course, from currō, "to run," so the word first named the ground that runners or chariots covered. The educational sense is a figurative course run through. In English this use is obsolete, so keep it for classical or historical settings. The same Latin word also produced its doublet, curricle.
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Origin
Borrowed from the Latin "curriculum" ("course"), which derives from "currō" ("to run, move quickly"). It is a doublet of "curricle."