Other forms: graduations
Graduation is the day your studies are finished and it is made official: cap, gown, your name read out, a handshake and a rolled certificate. Families in their good clothes, hats thrown in the air, photographs on the grass afterwards.
It also means the plain fact of finishing, with no ceremony attached — after graduation she moved to Berlin, a year since graduation, a graduation job. In America the word covers leaving high school as well as university; in Britain it belongs to universities, and school-leaving has no such day. The verb is graduate, and the prepositions matter: you graduate FROM a university, and in British English you graduate IN history. There is a technical meaning too — the small marked lines on a measuring cylinder or a thermometer are its graduations.
1noungraduationThe ceremony at which students receive their degrees or diplomas.~10%
“Her parents flew over for the graduation.”
2nounactThe act of completing a course of study.~88%
“He moved to Berlin straight after graduation.”
3nounmarkedOne of the marked lines on a measuring instrument.~2%
“Read the level against the graduations on the cylinder.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 19 sentences found in the wild and placed 19 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
graduation is a ceremony marking the end of study.
Graduation is graduate with -ion on the end, and the ending is doing the work: -ion turns a verb into the name of the act, the way celebrate gives celebration and examine gives examination. So the shape of the word tells you what to expect before you know the meaning — not the person and not the place, but the finishing itself.
Medieval Latin
graduātus — graduated, graduate
English
graduate
English, today
graduation
Built from
From graduate + ion. graduate comes from Middle English graduat (“(noun) a graduate of a university; (adjective) graduate, having graduated”), borrowed from Medieval Latin graduātus (“graduated, graduate”), perfect passive participle of graduō (“to graduate”) (see -ate), from gradus (“step”) + -ō. The noun is originally derived within Latin from the adjective via substantivization, see -ate. Sense 10 of the verb, relating to Japanese entertainment, is a 卒業.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA