Other forms: lectures, lectured, lecturing
A lecture is one person talking to a room full of people who came to learn. A hall of students, a screen behind, an hour of it, and everybody writing.
You give a lecture, go to a lecture, sit through a lecture, and at university you go to lectures the way a schoolchild goes to lessons. The verb splits cleanly in two, and the difference matters. Lecture on something is neutral and academic: she lectures on Roman law. Lecture someone is not: it means telling a person off at length about how they ought to behave, and nobody has ever enjoyed being on the receiving end — don't lecture me is what you say to make it stop. A lecturer, in Britain, is a job rather than a description: the university rank below professor.
1nounlectureA formal talk given to teach a group, especially at a university.~92%
“The lecture on Roman law ran twenty minutes over.”
synonyms: talk, address
2nounlongA long telling-off about how someone should behave.~2%
“I got a lecture about leaving the back door open.”
3verbspeechTo teach by giving formal talks, especially at a university.~4%
“She lectures in medieval history three days a week.”
4verblengthTo tell someone off at length, or preach at them.~2%
“Stop lecturing me about money.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 163 sentences found in the wild and placed 158 of them on a sense (5 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
A lecture was a reading, and once it was one literally. Latin legō meant to read out or recite, and lectura was the reading itself. The same root runs through half a shelf of English: a lesson is Latin lēctiō, a reading, and a legend is legendus, the things that ought to be read. A lecture is still a book being said aloud to a room that has not got it open in front of them.
Proto-Indo-European
*leǵ-
Latin
lectura — reading
Middle English
lecture
English, today
lecture
Built from
From Middle English lecture, lectour, letture, letteur, lettur, lectury, from Medieval Latin - or Latin lectura (“reading”), from Latin lectus, past participle of legō (“to read, recite”). a doublet of lector.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA