collegian

US/kəˈliː.dʒən/

collegian noun: a student (or a former student) of a college.

Noun

collegian (plural collegians)

A student (or a former student) of a college
- She then remembered that her own early bearing towards him had been haughty, and indifferent; that she had sneered at the young collegian's shyness; and now thought with "the late remorse of love," how unlike to this had been Ethel's gentle kindness.1837, L[etitia] E[lizabeth] L[andon], “Anticipation”, in Ethel Churchill: Or, The Two Brides. […], volume I, London: Henry Colburn, […], →OCLC, page 42
(slang) An inmate of a prison.
- While it [the wind] roared through the steeple of St George’s Church, and twirled all the cowls in the neighbourhood, it made a swoop to beat the Southwark smoke into the jail; and, plunging down the chimneys of the few early collegians who were yet lighting their fires, half suffocated them.1855 December – 1857 June, Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit, London: Bradbury and Evans, […], published 1857, →OCLC

collegian (comparative more collegian, superlative most collegian)

From Middle English collegian, from Medieval Latin collēgiānus.

What does collegian mean?: Collegian means a student (or a former student) of a college.
What part of speech is collegian?: Collegian can be a noun or an adjective.
How do you pronounce collegian?: Collegian is pronounced /kəˈliː.dʒən/ (US).
What is the plural of collegian?: The plural of collegian is collegians.

Adapted from Wiktionary: collegian (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated: 2026-09-02

Cite this entry: “collegian.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/collegian. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.