LIBERAL ARTS

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does liberal arts mean? 

• LIBERAL ARTS (noun)
  The noun LIBERAL ARTS has 1 sense:

1. studies intended to provide general knowledge and intellectual skills (rather than occupational or professional skills)

  Familiarity information: LIBERAL ARTS used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• LIBERAL ARTS (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Studies intended to provide general knowledge and intellectual skills (rather than occupational or professional skills)

Classified under:

Nouns denoting cognitive processes and contents

Synonyms:

arts; humanistic discipline; humanities; liberal arts

Context example:

the college of arts and sciences

Hypernyms ("liberal arts" is a kind of...):

bailiwick; discipline; field; field of study; study; subject; subject area; subject field (a branch of knowledge)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "liberal arts"):

Occidentalism (the scholarly knowledge of western cultures and languages and people)

quadrivium ((Middle Ages) a higher division of the curriculum in a medieval university involving arithmetic and music and geometry and astronomy)

trivium ((Middle Ages) an introductory curriculum at a medieval university involving grammar and logic and rhetoric; considered to be a triple way to eloquence)

stemmatics; stemmatology (the humanistic discipline that attempts to reconstruct the transmission of a text (especially a text in manuscript form) on the basis of relations between the various surviving manuscripts (sometimes using cladistic analysis))

Sinology (the study of Chinese history and language and culture)

musicology (the scholarly and scientific study of music)

linguistics; philology (the humanistic study of language and literature)

library science (the study of the principles and practices of library administration)

literary study (the humanistic study of literature)

philosophy (the rational investigation of questions about existence and knowledge and ethics)

Oriental Studies; Orientalism (the scholarly knowledge of Asian cultures and languages and people)

neoclassicism (revival of a classical style (in art or literature or architecture or music) but from a new perspective or with a new motivation)

performing arts (arts or skills that require public performance)

beaux arts; fine arts (the study and creation of visual works of art)

chronology (the determination of the actual temporal sequence of past events)

art history (the academic discipline that studies the development of painting and sculpture)

history (the discipline that records and interprets past events involving human beings)

English (the discipline that studies the English language and literature)

interior design (the art of designing the interior decoration for a house, office, or other architectural space)

Romantic Movement; Romanticism (a movement in literature and art during the late 18th and early 19th centuries that celebrated nature rather than civilization)

classicalism; classicism (a movement in literature and art during the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe that favored rationality and restraint and strict forms)

 Context examples 

A bachelor's degree in the liberal arts, usually awarded for studies in the social sciences or humanities.

(Bachelor of Arts, NCI Thesaurus)