• Question: what does phd stand for

    Asked by !ALTAF_BAHRAMI! to Sarah, Masha, Mark, Dominique, Andrei on 12 Nov 2016. This question was also asked by tiger11.
    • Photo: Mark Catherall

      Mark Catherall answered on 12 Nov 2016:

      Good question, it’s from the Latin for Doctor of Philosophy, in fact at Oxford it’s not even called a PhD, it’s called a DPhil, which makes it a bit more obvious what it stands for. In the olden days, when they were making this stuff up, they didn’t have lots of separate subjects, they just referred to all academic study as philosophy. ‘philo’ is greek for ‘love’ or ‘like’, and ‘sophos’ is the greek for ‘knowledge’. So ‘philosophy’ is from the greek for ‘love of knowledge’.

    • Photo: Sarah Hunt

      Sarah Hunt answered on 13 Nov 2016:

      I think Mark has given you a great definition of what PhD stands for.

      Humans have been learning, improving technology and our understanding of the world for hundreds of years. A PhD is about researching something really specific to understand it more than anyone has before. And once someone has a PhD (apart from being a Dr!) they will most likely work in research, to improve our knowledge even further.

      Things like mobile phones, the internet and cures to illnesses all came from researchers who all undertook a PhD to show they had the skills to research further. In the same way that a University degree shows that you have the skills to learn things.

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