Other forms: careers
Your career is your working life taken as one whole thing — the jobs, the promotions, the sideways move that turned out to matter. Thirty years at the same firm is a career, and so is a run of six different ones.
It goes with build, change and pursue, and it fills out compounds: career path, career change, career break, mid-career. A careerist is someone chasing promotion above all else, which is not a compliment. There is a second verb hiding in the same word: to career is to move fast and out of control, as in the trolley careered down the ramp and into the hedge. British English uses careered there; American English says careened, which strictly means to lean over. The stress falls on the second half, ca-REER, which keeps it clear of carrier.
1nouncareerThe series of jobs a person does through their working life, seen as a whole.~98%
“She spent her whole career at the same hospital.”
2verbmoveTo move fast and out of control.~2%
“The bike careered down the hill and into a hedge.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 27 sentences found in the wild and placed 27 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
career is a working life.
A career was a road long before it was a job. French carrière meant a road or a racecourse, taken from Italian carriera and Old Occitan carreira, from Latin carrāria — the track worn by carts, from carrus, a wheeled vehicle. The root behind all of it, *ḱers-, meant to run. Both modern senses are still in there: the long road of a working life, and the cart careering down it.
Latin
carrāria
Old Occitan
carreira
Italian
carriera
French
carrière — road; racecourse
English, today
career
Built from
Mid 16th century, from French carrière (“road; racecourse”), from Italian carriera, from Old Occitan carreira, from Latin carrāria based on Latin carrus (“wheeled vehicle”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European ḱr̥sós, from ḱers- (“to run”); alternatively, from Middle French carriere, from Old Occitan -.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA