Other forms: mentors, mentored, mentoring
A mentor is the experienced person who takes an interest in somebody younger and helps them get better. Not a teacher exactly, and not a boss — a mentor gives you their time because they want to.
The relationship is usually informal and long, and it runs both ways: people speak fondly of their mentor for decades. The verb has followed the noun into normal use — she mentors two junior engineers — and the person on the other end is a mentee, an ugly word that everybody nevertheless uses.
1nounmentorAn experienced person who advises and helps somebody less experienced.~88%
“Her old editor became her mentor for the next twenty years.”
synonyms: guide, adviser
2verbactTo act as that person for somebody.~12%
“He mentors two students every autumn.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 161 sentences found in the wild and placed 104 of them on a sense (57 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
mentor is a kind of teacher.
MENT-or → he builds your MENTal side
The old teacher taps his temple. Everything he hands you is mental — no money, no tools, only what stays in there.
hooks ontomental
From Mentor, the character in Homer's Odyssey left in charge of Odysseus's son while his father was away at war. The name became the job — and the name itself sits on an ancient root meaning to think.
Proto-Indo-European
*men- (think)
Proto-Indo-European
*monéyeti
Ancient Greek
Μέντωρ — Mentor
French
mentor
English, today
mentor
Built from
From French mentor, from Ancient Greek Μέντωρ (“Mentor”), a mythological character in the Odyssey, whose name, a historical name from Ancient Greece, shares the same root as English mind. Cognate to Sanskrit मन्तृ (“advisor, counselor”) and Latin monitor (“one who admonishes”), and perhaps ultimately from Proto-Indo-European monéyeti (compare Latin moneō (“to warn”), causative form of men- (“to think”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA