magna cum laude
5
8.9
- idiom
- /ˈmæɡ.nə kʌm ˈlaʊ.deɪ/
- Formal
:
magna cum laude
- Theodore Roosevelt graduated magna cum laude in 1880.
- graduated magna cum laude
Ross got his undergraduate degree Magna cum laude from Brown University, got his PhD here at Stanford.
- Ross got his undergraduate degree Magna cum laude from Brown University, got his PhD here at Stanford.
- You want to graduate Magna cum laude?
Examples
-
He graduated magna cum laude.
-
Professor Robertson graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where he also served as a fellow and lecturer.
Blog text (19) -
The committee awarded him his degree magna cum laude.
Academic text (1990) -
I graduated magna cum laude.
-
I graduated magna cum laude from UVA, Doctor.
Fiction book (1991) -
Judge Torres received her J.D. in 1984 from Columbia Law School and her A.B. magna cum laude in 1981 from Harvard College.
Blog text (18) -
Mr. Clements graduated with distinction in History and Government from Colby College in 1984, and magna cum laude with a concentration in Public Law from Cornell Law School in 1988.
Blog text (23) -
I graduated magna cum laude from Yale.
-
After graduating magna cum laude from Harvard, he spent a year in New Zealand on a Fulbright Fellowship.
-
Berry graduated magna cum laude with bachelor's degrees in economics and political science.
How Honored
Surface Forms
Morphology
magna + cum + laude
The phrase is a fixed Latin formula whose constituents are not ordinary English words a B1 learner would know; therefore it is not immediately transparent to typical learners. If a learner did know the Latin parts (magna = great, cum = with, laude = praise) they could roughly infer 'with great praise' and map that to 'with high academic honors', but the expression is register-specific and requires cultural/academic knowledge, so the relationship is only partially compositional.
Etymology
Magna cum laude comes from Latin words used at old universities, where magna means 'great', cum means 'with' and laude means 'praise'. So, to graduate magna cum laude today means to finish 'with high honors' because the phrase literally says 'with great praise'.