What does "professorial" mean?

Of, relating to, or characteristic of a professor or professors, or of a professorship or professorships.

What is a synonym for "professorial"?

Common synonyms include: academic, bookish, devoted to studies, diligent, donnish, dryasdust.

Pronounced //ˌprɒfəˈsɔːɹiəl//.

//ˌprɒfəˈsɔːɹiəl// adj

adj ·Uncommon ·Advanced level

Adjective

1
Of, relating to, or characteristic of a professor or professors, or of a professorship or professorships.
"David and I were not "intimate" friends. There was always a certain old-worldly formality about our interchanges. There was something professorial and distant about David, something that commanded respect, partially, I think, because he was so respectful himself."

Adjective

"We are bored with the joke of professorial custom."

From Latin professōrius (“professiorial; authoritative”) + -al. By surface analysis, professor + -ial.

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