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symposium

UK/sɪmˈpəʊziəm/US/sɪmˈpoʊziəm/
nounC1Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #9,628 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: symposia, symposiums

A symposium is a meeting of experts to discuss one subject. Hold a symposium, speak at the symposium, a symposium on the topic.

The Greek behind it means a drinking party, which is what Plato's Symposium describes: a group of men drinking and talking about love. The modern academic version has kept the talking. The plural can be symposia or symposiums.

Definitions of symposium

  1. 1nounsymposiumA meeting of experts to discuss one subject.C1

    “Doctors from twenty countries attended the symposium on heart disease in Geneva.”

symposium is a meeting.

Where it comes from

Greek symposion means a drinking together — syn, together, plus pinein, to drink.

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *sem-

  2. Ancient Greek

    συμπόσιον — drinking party

  3. Latin

    symposium

  4. English, today

    symposium

Built from

  • συμπίνω · Ancient Greek — drink together
  • συν- · Ancient Greek — together-
  • πίνω · Ancient Greek — drink

Borrowed from Latin symposium, from Ancient Greek συμπόσιον (“drinking party”) from συμπίνω (“drink together”), from συν- (“together-”) + πίνω (“drink”). Morphologically compare compotation.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

symposium in the wild

  • The Latin equivalent of a Greek symposium in Roman society is convivium.

    Symposium (ancient Greece)

  • The symposium was established in 1969, initially as three-year event, then as a biennial event, and, finally, from 2015 as an annual symposium.

    ARITH Symposium on Computer Arithmetic

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.