Word.ws English Dictionary

pseudo-scholarship

pseudo-scholarship noun: any body of publications purported to be scholarly or supported by critical scholarship but which fails to comply with scholarly standards.

Noun

pseudo-scholarship (countable and uncountable, plural pseudo-scholarships)

  1. (uncountable) Any body of publications purported to be scholarly or supported by critical scholarship but which fails to comply with scholarly standards.
    • […] if we had possessed much more of the patristic history and literature, our pseudo-scholarship, the natural worship of antiquity, and the spirit of prelatic superstition, would only have used them as so many stronger entrenchments […] ('Mr. Cooper's "Free Church of Ancient Christendom"', The...
    • […] it still remains difficult for university presidents and boards of control to distinguish between pseudoscholarship and real scholarship in the selection of professors (American Medical Association bulletin, 1910, p. 308)
  2. (countable) An arrangement that in effect grants a scholarship to a student, without being considered on a par with a real or standard scholarship
    • […] the exceptional close Scholarships would be felt to be something less honourable than the average Scholarship, in fact, as a sort of Pseudo-scholarship. (Report and evidence upon the recommendations of Her Majesty's Commissioners for inquiring into the state of the University of Oxford...
    • These jobs, which require students to prove financial need, serve as pseudo-scholarships, enabling some students to afford college. (Greg Gottesman, Daniel Baer, College Survival 7th Ed., Peterson's (2004), p. 212.)

Forms of pseudo-scholarship

pluralpseudo-scholarships
alternative formpseudoscholarship

Origin of pseudo-scholarship

From pseudo- + scholarship. 19th-century coinage.

Words formed from pseudo-scholarship

Questions about pseudo-scholarship

What does pseudo-scholarship mean?
Pseudo-scholarship means any body of publications purported to be scholarly or supported by critical scholarship but which fails to comply with scholarly standards.
What part of speech is pseudo-scholarship?
Pseudo-scholarship is a noun.
What is the plural of pseudo-scholarship?
The plural of pseudo-scholarship is pseudo-scholarships.

Words near pseudo-scholarship in the dictionary

  1. pseudo-rhombicuboctahedron
  2. pseudo-Riemannian manifold
  3. pseudo-Riemannian manifolds
  4. pseudo-riparian
  5. pseudo-Russian
  6. pseudo-scholarship
  7. pseudo-scholarships
  8. pseudo-science
  9. pseudo-sciences
  10. pseudo-skull
  11. pseudo-skulls

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pseudo-scholarship (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:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-pseudo-scholarship.wav.

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