Other forms: syllabi, syllabuses
A syllabus is the official list of everything a course will cover — the topics, the order, and often the assessment. On the syllabus, off the syllabus, the new syllabus starts in September.
The plural is syllabuses or syllabi, and both are used; syllabuses is the safer choice in Britain. It sits close to curriculum and the two are not the same: a curriculum is everything a school teaches, a syllabus is one course within it. Learners meet the word most in the phrase on the syllabus, meaning it will come up in the exam, which is why it matters so much to anybody studying for one.
1nounsyllabusThe list of topics a course will cover.
“That period is not on the syllabus this year.”
synonyms: course outline, programme
syllabus is a list of course content.
Syllabus is a mistake that became a word. A fifteenth-century printing of Cicero misread the Greek sittybas, meaning labels on a scroll, as syllabos, and later scholars took the invented word to mean a table of contents. The error is now the standard term in every education system in the English-speaking world.
Ancient Greek
σιττύβα — parchment label; table of contents
Medieval Latin
syllabus — list
English, today
syllabus
Borrowed from Medieval Latin syllabus (“list”), which arose from accusative plural syllabōs appearing as a sittybās in a 1470s edition of Cicero's “Ad Atticum” IV.5 and 8, influenced by the stem of Ancient Greek συλλαμβάνω (“to put together”).[http://books.google.gr/books?id=k
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA