Paraprofessional

adj, noun

adj, noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A person who is trained to assist a professional: for example, an assistant to an educator.

    "While these were years of rapid growth, with increasing involvement of paraprofessionals, peer counselors, and, as Rosen says, "good-hearted gay people who wanted to be supportive to their gay brothers and sisters," the atmosphere was still that of a community peer counseling center rather than a professional mental health center or alcoholism treatment center per se."

  2. 2
    a trained worker who is not a member of a profession but who assists a professional wordnet
Adjective
  1. 1
    Of or relating to this assistance. not-comparable

Example

More examples

"While these were years of rapid growth, with increasing involvement of paraprofessionals, peer counselors, and, as Rosen says, "good-hearted gay people who wanted to be supportive to their gay brothers and sisters," the atmosphere was still that of a community peer counseling center rather than a professional mental health center or alcoholism treatment center per se."

Etymology

From para- + professional.

More for "paraprofessional"

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.