fieldwork

UK/ˈfiːldwɜːk/US/ˈfildwɝk/

nounB2+Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #12,663 of 15,258mostly written

Fieldwork is research done out in the real world rather than in a library or laboratory. Do fieldwork, months of fieldwork, fieldwork notes.

In anthropology it means living among the people studied for a long stretch, which is where the discipline's whole method came from. In archaeology and geology it is digging and surveying. What it shares everywhere is that conditions cannot be controlled.

Definitions of fieldwork

1nounfieldworkResearch done out in the real world, not the library or lab.B2+
“The biology students spent a week doing fieldwork on the seashore.”

fieldwork is research.

Where it comes from

Field plus work, in Middle English. The research sense grew in the nineteenth century.

Middle English
*felde-werk
English, today
fieldwork

From Middle English felde-werk (found in plural felde werkes), equivalent to field + work.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Academic English

Practise this word

fieldwork in the wild

Mead also conducted fieldwork with the Omaha people; in Manus, Papua New Guinea; and in Bali.
Margaret Mead
Field research, field studies, or fieldwork is the collection of raw data outside a laboratory, library, or workplace setting.
Field research
Jason Lobel and Laura Robinson did fieldwork on Northern Alta in 2006.
Northern Alta language
Where the fieldwork dates are unknown, the date of publication is given instead.
Opinion polling for the 2019 Spanish local elections (Castilla–La Mancha)

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

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