faculty: [14] If one has a faculty for doing something, one finds it ‘easy’ to do. The word comes, via Old French faculte, from Latin facultās. This was a parallel form to facilitās (source of English facility [15]). Both were derived from Latin facilis ‘easy’ (whence English facile [15]), an adjective formed from the verb facere ‘do’. Since facilitās more closely resembled facilis, it retained its connotations of ‘easiness’, whereas by the classical period facultās had more or less lost them, coming to mean ‘capability, power’. => facile, facility
faculty (n.)
late 14c., "ability, opportunity, means, resources," from Old French faculte "skill, accomplishment, learning" (14c., Modern French faculté) and directly from Latin facultatem (nominative facultas) "power, ability, capability, opportunity; sufficient number, abundance, wealth," from *facli-tat-s, from facilis (see facile).
Academic sense "branch of knowledge" (late 14c.) was in Old French and probably was the earliest in English (it is attested in Anglo-Latin from late 12c.), on notion of "ability in knowledge" or "body of persons on whom are conferred specific professional powers." Originally each department was a faculty; the use in reference to the whole teaching staff of an entire college dates from 1767. Related: Facultative. The Latin words facultas and facilitas "were originally different forms of the same word; the latter, owing to its more obvious relationship to the adj., retained the primary sense of 'easiness', which the former had ceased to have before the classical period." [OED]
双语例句
1. Faculty members complain that their students are unprepared to do college-level work.
学院的老师们抱怨说他们的学生还很不适应大学的课业。
来自柯林斯例句
2. She was Dean of the Science faculty at Sophia University.
她是上智大学科学院的院长。
来自柯林斯例句
3. Faculty members devote most of their time to scholarly research.
全院教师大部分时间都用来从事学术研究。
来自柯林斯例句
4. How can faculty improve their teaching so as to encourage creativity?
教师们如何才能改进教学以激发创造性呢？
来自柯林斯例句
5. The Bush Foundation has funded a variety of faculty development programs.
