Other forms: teachers
A teacher is the person whose job is to help other people learn. Chalk dust on a sleeve, a pile of exercise books to mark at the kitchen table, a name going up on the board on the first morning of term.
Teachers are not only found in schools: there are piano teachers, yoga teachers, driving teachers. English has a separate word for each kind of teaching - a lecturer teaches at a university, a tutor teaches one to one, an instructor teaches a practical skill, a professor holds a senior university post - and teacher covers all of them when you want a single word. One trap: in Britain you address a teacher as Mr Powell or Miss Ahmed, never as Teacher, which many learners say because their own language allows it. The word also stretches past people, so experience, failure and hunger all get called good teachers.
1nounteacherA person whose job is to help others learn, especially in a school.~98%
“Her form teacher rang home about the missing homework.”
synonyms: educator, schoolteacher
2nounanythingAnything that teaches you something.~2%
“Failure is a harsher teacher than success, and a better one.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 9 sentences found in the wild and placed 9 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
teacher is a profession.
Teacher is teach with -er stuck on the end, the ending that turns an action into the person doing it: bake gives baker, farm gives farmer, teach gives teacher. English has had the word since Middle English, spelt techere. It is one of the plainest words in the language, built exactly the way a child would build it.
Middle English
techere
English, today
teacher
From Middle English techere, equivalent to teach + er. More at teach.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA