Other forms: degrees
A degree is what you walk away with after three or four years at university. You do a degree in history, you sit the last exam, and somebody hands you a rolled-up certificate in a hall full of people in borrowed gowns.
Degree is a unit as well, and two different ones. Temperature runs in degrees: water boils at a hundred degrees Celsius, and the forecast says twenty-eight tomorrow. Angles run in degrees too, so a right angle is ninety of them and a full turn is three hundred and sixty. Then there is the everyday sense of amount — a degree of risk, a degree of comfort, to some degree — where the word never takes a number and stays careful and slightly formal, the thing you say when you would rather not say yes outright. Watch the prepositions: a degree in a subject, from a university.
1noundegreeThe qualification a university gives you at the end of a course of study.~82%
“She finished her degree in engineering last summer.”
synonyms: qualification
2nountemperatureA unit of temperature.~8%
“Water boils at one hundred degrees Celsius.”
3nounmeasuringA unit for measuring angles — three hundred and sixty of them make a full turn.~2%
“Turn the handle through ninety degrees.”
4nounextentAn amount or extent of something.~8%
“The job carries a degree of risk.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 175 sentences found in the wild and placed 168 of them on a sense (7 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Behind degree is Latin gradus, a step — the same Latin word that gave English grade. A degree was one step of a staircase, and everything the word does now is still steps on a scale: one step of temperature, one step of an angle, the step you climb at the end of a university course.
Latin
gradus
Old French
degré
Middle English
degre
English, today
degree
From Middle English degre, borrowed from Old French degré (French: degré), itself from Latin gradus, with the prefix de-.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA