teach

See also: Teach

English

Pronunciation

  • IPA(key): /tiːt͡ʃ/
  • Rhymes: -iːtʃ
  • Audio (US)(file)

Etymology 1

From Middle English techen, from Old English tǣċan (“to show, declare, demonstrate; teach, instruct, train; assign, prescribe, direct; warn; persuade”), from Proto-Germanic *taikijaną (“to show”), from Proto-Indo-European *deyḱ- (“to show”). Cognate with Scots tech, teich (“to teach”), German zeigen (“to show, point out”), zeihen (“accuse, blame”), Gothic 𐌲𐌰𐍄𐌴𐌹𐌷𐌰𐌽 (gateihan, “to announce, declare, tell”)|tr=gateihan|, Latin dīcō (“speak, say, tell”), Ancient Greek δείκνυμι (deíknumi, “show, point out, explain, teach”). More at token.

Verb

teach (third-person singular simple present teaches, present participle teaching, simple past and past participle taught)

  1. (obsolete, transitive) To show (someone) the way; to guide, conduct; to point, indicate.
    ‘The bliss is there’, mumbled the old man and taught to Heaven.
    • c1450, Mandeville's Travelsː
      Blessed God of might (the) most.. teach us the right way unto that bliss that lasteth aye.
    • c1460, Cursor Mundiː
      Till thy sweet sun uprose, thou keptest all our lay, how we should keep our belief there taught'st thou us the way.
    • 1485, Sir Thomas Malory, chapter v, in Le Morte Darthur, book VI:
      So thus within a whyle as they thus talked the nyghte passed / and the daye shone / and thenne syre launcelot armed hym / and took his hors / and they taught hym to the Abbaye and thyder he rode within the space of two owrys
  2. (transitive) To pass on knowledge to.
    Can you teach me to sew?  Can you teach sewing to me?
    Synonyms: educate, instruct
  3. (intransitive) To pass on knowledge, especially as one's profession; to act as a teacher.
    She used to teach at university.
    Antonym: learn
  4. (transitive) To cause to learn or understand.
    • 1898, Winston Churchill, chapter 8, in The Celebrity:
      The humor of my proposition appealed more strongly to Miss Trevor than I had looked for, and from that time forward she became her old self again; […]. Now she had come to look upon the matter in its true proportions, and her anticipation of a possible chance of teaching him a lesson was a pleasure to behold.
    • 2013 September-October, Rob Dorit, “Making Life from Scratch”, in American Scientist:
      Deep Blue taught us a great deal about the power of the human mind precisely because it could not reproduce the intuitive and logical leaps of Kasparov’s mind. A truly synthetic cell, built from scratch or even from preexisting components, will be a cell without ancestry, and it, too, will teach us a great deal about the underlying complexities of life without actually reproducing them.
Derived terms
Translations

References

Etymology 2

Clipping of teacher

Noun

teach (plural teaches)

  1. (informal, usually as a term of address) teacher

Anagrams

Irish

Alternative forms

Etymology

From Old Irish tech, from Proto-Celtic *tegos, from Proto-Indo-European *tegos (“cover, roof”).

Pronunciation

Noun

teach m (genitive singular tí, nominative plural tithe)

  1. house
    1. habitation, dwelling
    2. public building
    3. structure resembling a house

Declension

Derived terms

Mutation

Irish mutation
Radical Lenition Eclipsis
teach theach dteach
Note: Some of these forms may be hypothetical. Not every
possible mutated form of every word actually occurs.

Further reading

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