SYNONYMS AND RELATED EXPRESSIONS
intellectual
adjective
Relating to thought, understanding, or the exercise of the mind.
Local English device voice, when available. This is not a recorded dictionary pronunciation.
Concerning thought
Closest synonyms
Related words and expressions
These extend or explain the idea and may require a different sentence structure.
Usage distinction
Return to topScholarly concerns learned study; intellectual can describe any serious exercise of thought, whether academic or not.
CHECK THE MEANING IN CONTEXT
See intellectual in use
The seminar offered an intellectual challenge without assuming that every participant had the same background.
In an academic seminar, students compared how two fictional neighborhoods organized their shared spaces using details from an assigned novel. The exercise was intellectual because it required sustained thought about relationships among evidence, interpretation, and social arrangements.
Compare an alternative with the original word in each passage. Shared meanings do not make every pair interchangeable.
Synonym reference scope and sources
The groups distinguish the senses selected for this study entry. Closest synonyms and broader related expressions have separate labels. The listed sources support lexical selection; not every phrase is a direct quotation from a source.
How the synonym reference was prepared / WordNet 3.0 license