intellectuals
- 1Plural of intellectual.
The country's leading intellectuals signed an open letter opposing the censorship bill.
During the upheaval, intellectuals were often the first voices the government tried to silence.
Note
A regular plural, and always a noun: the adjective intellectual never takes an -s, so intellectuals names either people or, in older writing, mental faculties. The people sense dominates, often as a collective social group in political and sociological writing, as in a country's intellectuals or the intellectuals of a movement. The older use, where someone's intellectuals were their powers of understanding, is archaic and now reads as a period touch.
intellectuals is a form of intellectual
intellectual, noun: A learned, intelligent person, especially one who studies and discusses serious or scholarly subjects. Full entry
- Forms
- intellectualintellectuals plural
- Spelling
- intellectual → intellectuals: add -s
- Sound
- The ending sounds like /z/.
Use it in a sentence
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