Ivy League
46
3.8
- noun
- /ˈaɪvi liɡ/
- US
:
Ivy League
- You know, the smartest people go to Ivy League schools or Cambridge and Oxford.
- Ivy League universities
- Ivy League schools
- an Ivy League college
One of the couples attended top Ivy League colleges, she writes.
- One of the couples attended top Ivy League colleges, she writes.
- She goes to a four year Ivy League school with her tuition, books, living situation, all paid for by rich grandparents, and she gets to go on to be a subpar journalist.
- Same message was being taught in the Ivy League school by these professors.
- So I have an Ivy League background, education.
- And we exist both on each Ivy League campus and we have an inter Ivy community.
- You're no longer, you know, captured by the Ivy League institutions.
- I'm open for a bit of education about the Ivy League today.
- And I went to an Ivy League college who are protesting for Hamas.
- So what does Ivy League produce a lot of a lot of liberals, right?
Examples
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Brown is an Ivy League school, an extremely good school for mathematics.
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Do you understand how hard it is to get into an Ivy League school now?
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And we still call it the Ivy League, right?
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So I have an Ivy League background, education.
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Got offers from 8 Ivy League schools.
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Plus, he had a full sports scholarship to an Ivy League college in the East.
Fiction book (2002) -
The first black woman to be president of Ivy League school, Doctor Simmons led the way.
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Dr. Simmons thus became the first African American to head an Ivy League university.
Academic text (2004) -
Seeing as he's an Ivy League grad, I guess that makes him better at our jobs than we are.
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Many students dream of attending an Ivy League university due to its prestigious reputation.
Surface Forms
Morphology
Ivy + league
A B1 learner who knows 'ivy' (a climbing plant) and 'league' (an organized group) would not be able to infer the specific, culturally loaded meaning ‘the eight prestigious northeastern US universities’ because 'Ivy' here is a metonymic/proper-name use and the phrase names a fixed institutional set. This is a culturally specific proper noun requiring world-knowledge rather than compositional derivation, so the expression is opaque.
Etymology
Ivy League comes from two clear images: old college buildings covered in ivy and the sports league those schools belonged to. One popular story says people put these images together into the short name, so today Ivy League means 'a small group of eight very well-known and respected universities in the northeastern United States'.