Other forms: consultations
A consultation is a meeting to seek advice or opinion. Either you are asking an expert, or somebody is asking everybody.
The medical sense is a single appointment, so a consultation with a specialist is one meeting. The public sense is quite different, since a public consultation is a formal process in which an authority asks for views before deciding, and it usually runs for weeks. Sceptics point out that the outcome is often decided first. The verb consult takes with for a person and no preposition for a document.
1nounconsultationA meeting to obtain professional advice.
“The first consultation lasted half an hour.”
2nounprocessA formal process of seeking public or staff opinion.
“The council opened a consultation on the parking scheme.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
Latin
consultatio
Middle French
consultation
English, today
consultation
From Middle French consultation, from Latin consultatio. Morphologically consult + ation.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA