Other forms: sciences
Science is the careful study of how the world works, tested against evidence. Study science, a science lesson, the science is clear.
It is uncountable for the activity and countable for its branches: the sciences, a science, natural sciences. In British schools science is taught as one subject before splitting into physics, chemistry and biology. The word also gets used loosely for a body of knowledge — the science of cooking — and the phrase it's not rocket science is a fixed and slightly worn joke meaning it is not difficult. Note scientific and scientist, which was coined as recently as 1834.
1nounscienceThe study of the world through observation and experiment.
“The whole argument rests on science that has been checked.”
2nounparticularA particular branch of that study.
“She teaches three sciences to the older years.”
3nounbodyA body of organised knowledge about something.
“There is a science to arranging a shop, and he knows it.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
science is a way of studying.
Latin scientia meant knowledge, from scire, to know. For centuries science in English meant any body of knowledge, and what we now call science was natural philosophy. The narrowing to the experimental method is a nineteenth-century change, and it happened at about the same time the word scientist was invented for the people doing it.
Middle English
science
English, today
science
Built from
From Middle English science. From Middle English science, scyence, borrowed from Old French science, escience, from Latin scientia (“knowledge”), from sciēns, the present participle stem of scire (“to know”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA