How to spell syllabus

hear itsyl·la·bus/'sɪləbəs/nounSchwa and roots

What it means: An outline of what will be taught in a course.

In a sentence: The teacher gave each student a colorful syllabus on the first day of school.

The part people get wrong

Watch for double l, and an unstressed vowel that is hard to hear. Often misspelled as sylabus.

Same family: syllabi, syllabuses, curriculum, outline, course-plan. If you can spell one, the shared part carries to the others.

Where it comes from: Syllabus comes from a mistaken reading of a Greek word in a 15th-century Latin manuscript, and the form 'syllabus' stuck. Its plural can be either the Latin-style 'syllabi' or the regular English 'syllabuses'.

Patterns it uses: The unstressed vowel (schwa)

Try spelling it

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