Other forms: faculties
A faculty is one of the big branches a university is divided into — the Faculty of Medicine, the Faculty of Arts. If you study there, your faculty is where your subject lives: its building, its exams, its staff.
In American English, faculty means the teachers themselves taken as one body, so 'the faculty voted' means the professors voted, and you say faculty members rather than facultys. The older sense has nothing to do with universities: a faculty is a power the mind or the body has. The faculty of speech, the faculty of sight, and the phrase you meet in novels and medical notes, in full possession of his faculties, meaning the mind still works. Keep it apart from facility, which is a building or a service; a faculty is a division, a staff, or an ability.
1nounlargeOne of the large divisions a university is split into, covering a group of subjects.
“She teaches in the Faculty of Law.”
2nounfacultyThe teaching staff of a university or college, taken together.
“The faculty voted to change the exam timetable.”
3nounabilityA power of the mind or the body.
“He kept every faculty sharp into his nineties.”
The Latin behind it means easy. A faculty was first how easy a thing came to you, and only later the people who teach it.
hooks ontoeasy
Faculty came through Old French from Latin facultas, capability or ability, itself a variant of facilitas, easiness, from facilis, easy. So faculty and facility are twins from one Latin word: one kept the ability, the other kept the ease. Medieval Latin then gave facultas a second job as a word for a body of teachers, and that is the sense that ended up with a building.
Old French
faculte
Middle English
faculte — power, property
English, today
faculty
Built from
From Middle English faculte (“power, property”), from Old French faculte, from Latin facultas (“capability, ability, skill, abundance, plenty, stock, goods, property; in Medieval Latin - also a body of teachers”), another form of facilitas (“easiness, facility, etc.”), from facul, another form of facilis (“easy, facile”); see facile. a doublet of facility.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA