Other forms: theses
A thesis is the long piece of research a student writes to finish a degree: years of work, hundreds of pages, bound in the last week and handed in with shaking hands. It is also the central claim inside any piece of writing — the thesis of the article is that cities are getting quieter.
The plural is theses, said THEE-seez, and it catches everyone out; there is no thesises. In Britain a thesis is what you write for a doctorate and a dissertation is what you write for a master's; in the United States it runs the other way round, so ask which one is meant. In argument, your thesis is the position you set out to defend, and everything after it is evidence. Philosophy adds thesis and antithesis, a claim and its opposite, pulled together into a synthesis. And a thesis statement is the single sentence near the start of an essay that says what the whole thing will argue.
1nounthesisA long piece of written research submitted for a university degree.~47%
“Her thesis ran to three hundred pages and took four years.”
synonyms: dissertation
2nounlogicThe main claim that a piece of work sets out to prove.~53%
“The book's thesis is that the famine was avoidable.”
synonyms: proposition, contention, argument
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 17 sentences found in the wild and placed 17 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Thesis is Ancient Greek θέσις — 'arrangement, placement, setting', and from there 'position' — built on τίθημι, 'to place, put, set'. It reached English through Latin thesis, which carried a meaning nobody expects today: the lowering of the voice. The Greek root is Proto-Indo-European *dʰeh₁-, 'to do; to place, put', which makes this most academic of words a twin of the plainest English word for a thing done: deed.
Proto-Indo-European
*dʰeh₁- — to do; to place, put
Ancient Greek
θέσῐς — arrangement, placement, setting; conclusion, position, thesis; lowering of the voice
Latin
thesis — proposition, thesis; lowering of the voice
Middle English
thesis — lowering of the voice
English, today
thesis
Built from
From Late Middle English thesis (“lowering of the voice”) and also borrowed directly from its etymon Latin thesis (“proposition, thesis; lowering of the voice”), from Ancient Greek θέσῐς (“arrangement, placement, setting; conclusion, position, thesis; lowering of the voice”), from τῐ́θημῐ (“to place, put, set; to put down in writing; to consider as, regard”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European dʰeh₁- (“to do; to place, put”)) + -σῐς. The English word is a a doublet of deed. Sense 1.1 (“proposition or statement supported by arguments”) is adopted from antithesis. Sense 1.4 (“initial stage of reasoning”) was first used by the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), and later applied to the dialectical method of his countryman, the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). The plural form theses is borrowed from Latin thesēs, from Ancient Greek θέσεις.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA