matriculate
verb
Did you know?
Anybody who has had basic Latin knows that alma mater, a fancy term for the school you attended, comes from a phrase that means "fostering mother." If mater is mother, then matriculate probably has something to do with a school nurturing you just like good old mom, right? Not exactly. If you go back far enough, matriculate is distantly related to the Latin mater, but its maternal associations were lost long ago—even in terms of Latin history. It is more closely related to Late Latin matricula, which means "public roll or register." Matricula has more to do with being enrolled than being mothered, but it is the diminutive form of the Latin matrix, which in Late Latin was used in the sense of "list" or "register" and earlier referred to female animals kept for the purposes of breeding.
Examples of matriculate in a Sentence
Christopher Rim, Forbes.com, 25 June 2025
Until that point, Victor had been living a typical postgrad creative life in Brooklyn, matriculating through the stand-up comedy scene and working part-time at the woman-run satire website Reductress.
—Rachel Brodsky, Rolling Stone, 6 June 2025
Ananda was born in Los Angeles, California, and attended the San Diego School of Creative and Performing Arts before heading to the nation’s capital to matriculate at Howard University.
—Doug Melville, Forbes.com, 13 June 2025
New York University and Columbia University each have around 25,000 F-1 students currently matriculating, as does Northeastern in Boston.
—Dan Gooding, MSNBC Newsweek, 6 June 2025
See All Example Sentences for matriculate
Cite this Entry
“Matriculate.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/matriculate. Accessed 12 Jul. 2025.
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matriculate
verb
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