Other forms: scheduled, scheduling, schedules
A schedule is a plan of what happens when — the hours of a working day, the times of trains, the order of items at a conference. As a verb it means to arrange something for a particular time.
It is the word most likely to give away where somebody learned English: SHED-yool in Britain, SKED-jool in America, and both are entirely standard in their own place. On or behind or ahead of schedule are the fixed phrases, and they take no article. British English often prefers timetable for trains and school lessons and keeps schedule for work and projects; American English uses schedule for all of them. In law, a schedule is also a numbered appendix to a contract or an Act, which is why documents refer to Schedule 2.
1nounscheduleA plan showing when things will happen.
“The schedule leaves ten minutes between sessions.”
synonyms: timetable, programme
2verbarrangeTo arrange for something to happen at a particular time.
“The meeting is scheduled for Thursday.”
3nounnumberedA numbered list attached to a contract or an Act of Parliament.
“The exemptions are set out in Schedule 4.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
schedule is a plan of times.
Latin schedula was a small strip of papyrus — a slip of paper. It meant a note or a list before it meant a plan of times, and the legal sense, an attached list at the back of a document, is the oldest one still in use.
Latin
schedula — papyrus strip
Old French
cedule
Middle French
cedule
Middle English
cedule
English, today
schedule
Built from
Middle English cedule, from Middle French cedule (whence French cédule), from Old French cedule, from Latin schedula (“papyrus strip”), diminutive of Latin scheda, from Ancient Greek σχέδη (“papyrus leaf”), from Proto-Hellenic skʰíďďō, from Proto-Indo-European skid-yé-ti, from skeyd- (“to divide, split”). a doublet of cedula and cedule. This word was historically pronounced; the pronunciations with and are due to the spelling (the latter may have been reinforced by learned influence); compare schism.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA