emeritus
Language: English
Part of speech: noun
Pronunciation: ipa: /ɪˈmɛɹɪtəs/
note: weak vowel merger
ipa: /əˈmɛɹətəs/
rhymes: -ɛɹɪtəs
ipa: /ɪˈmɛɹɪtaɪ/
note: weak vowel merger
ipa: /əˈmɛɹətaɪ/
Forms: form: emeriti
form: emerituses
Etymology: The adjective is a learned borrowing from Latin ēmeritus (“(having been) earned, (having been) merited; (having been) served, having done one’s service”), the perfect passive participle of ēmereō (“to earn, merit; to gain by service; (military) to complete one’s obligation to serve, to serve out one’s time”), from ex- (prefix meaning ‘away; out’) + mereō (“to deserve, merit; to acquire, earn, get, obtain; to render service to; to serve”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *(s)mer- (“to allot; to assign”)).
The noun is derived from the adjective. The plural form emeriti is borrowed from Latin ēmeritī.
Senses: examples: text: Martin Engels said: “I am not posted on dyke-bridges, but if it is a Dutch scheme there may be something in it. That engineer made a mistake by calling the city officials emerituses. He should not call people names if he wants the Municipal Council to build his twenty-four-million-dollar bridge. If the Tammany organization wants to build a dyke-bridge, I’m for it.”
ref: 1900 September 21, “Dyke-Bridge Proposed. Engineer Santi Wants to Unite Manhattan and Richmond Boroughs—Tammany Men’s Views.”, in The New York Times, volume L, number 15,820, New York, N.Y., page 11, column 7:
text: Now, we have no criticism for college presidents and emerituses as such. A man may be all that and still be a pretty good fellow—whatever the effect might be on his character and happiness. But there is one thing certain—no one man can know it all.
ref: 1914 February 15, “The Case of Dr. Eliot”, in The Topeka Daily Capital, volume XXXVII, number 362, Topeka, Kan., page 8 B, column 1:
text: A “State-of-Mind” called Winter Park, / Where genius thrives, a brilliant spark, / Emerituses tramp thru dark / To hear illustrious profs remark / On “culchar,” tone and style. / So, hark, / While dogs, in tongues semantic, bark!
ref: 1938 April 12, “How Time Flies (From Reporter-Star Files)”, in Orlando Reporter-Star, volume 52, number 47, Orlando, Fla., poem “Rhapsodies!”, stanza I, page four, column 3:
text: Oh you, veteran crime reporter, you grave old usher, you once popular policeman, now in solitary confinement after gracing that school crossing for years, you wretched emeritus read to by a boy!
ref: 1955, Vladimir Nabokov, chapter 8, in Lolita, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: G[eorge] P[almer] Putnam’s Sons, published August 1958, →OCLC, part 1, page 30:
text: And so, another well-deserving name has been added to Central Florida’s list of emerituses, perhaps the most distinguished lineup of names in the area.
ref: 1961 December 22, Charlie Wadsworth, “Hush Puppies”, in Orlando Sentinel, volume 77, number 222, Orlando, Fla., pages 10—C, column 2:
text: Should he take the international presidency in a few years he would be in line for the AFL-CIO National Executive Council, now replete with emerituses.
ref: 1963 April 22, Victor Riesel, “Inside Labor—Power’s Star Rides on Union Vote”, in Omaha World-Herald, 98th year, number 176, Omaha, Neb., page 3ᴹ, column 4:
text: Back then, the poet Witter Bynner was invited to give a series of talks. His classes were small. It was beautiful weather. He took them out on the lawn. The faculty never forgot. To this very day you can find snowy haired emerituses toddling about in homspun^([sic]) tweeds who will tell you, “Had a poet here once. Name of Winter, think it was. Took the students out on the lawn.”
ref: 1964 December 9, Kenneth Rexroth, “Depersonalized Campus”, in San Francisco Examiner, page 46, column 5:
text: The Emerituses Are Back / More unfinished business: / The Commission on Governmental Ethics voted this week to look into the “emeritus” pay drawn by five retired state college presidents. The motion to investigate was made by commission member Victor Bussie, state president of the AFL-CIO, who said it was desirable to determine “whether or not university and college funds are being paid to people who are not performing useful work.” The only “no” vote on Mr. Bussie’s motion was cast by Commission Chairman Vanue Lacour, who argued that the code of ethics was never intended to apply to college and university affairs.
ref: 1974 March 30, Adras LaBorde, “Talk of the Town”, in Alexandria Daily Town Talk, volume XCII, number 14, Alexandria, La. – Pineville, La., section A, page four, column 5:
text: Unfortunately for the publicity shy doctor, the occasion happened to be the presentation of the much coveted Dhanvantri Award and newsmen had a field day clicking away at the galaxy of medical emerituses.
ref: 1979, Business India, page 6:
text: WHEN IT was announced Tuesday that my title henceforth will be “editor emeritus,” with Mike Kidder taking over as editor of the paper, I received a call from a very high-ranking Stanford official. “I never knew they had emerituses in your business,” he said. “I never did either,” I replied, “but it seemed to hit the right combination of subliminal dignity and overt ambiguity.”
ref: 1984 April 8, Leonard Koppett, “An ‘editor emeritus’ may yet produce a ‘pontificus maximus’”, in The Peninsula Times Tribune, page C-3, column 1:
text: You include some comment by Sakharov Institute organizers, but who are they compared to all the “emerituses”?
ref: 1984 November 11, Alex Cogan, “Editor’s mailbox”, in San Francisco Examiner, volume 1984, number 46, page B10, column 5:
text: He, Slick Moore, Phil Clark, Whitey Kendall, and Chico Bolin, all coaching emerituses, visit at the banquet each August and Howard insults them just as he did 40 years ago.
ref: 1991 August 2, Dan Foster, “Howard, Drysdale”, in The Greenville News, 117th year, number 210, page 1D, column 1:
text: As is so often the case, this particular critic is a professor emeritus and emerituses often grow reckless once free of the daily grind of dispensing received opinion.
ref: 1996 May 23, Gore Vidal, “Twain on the Grand Tour”, in Robert B[enjamin] Silvers, Barbara Epstein, editors, The New York Review of Books, New York, N.Y.: Rea S. Hederman, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 06 Feb 2023, part 1:
text: What girl is among the front-runners of Sydney University’s emerituses?
ref: 1997 March 28, “Holiday Crossword Quiz”, in The Sydney Morning Herald, number 49,787, page 14, column 5:
text: “We could try going back, but that probably means dropping the expedition. Have you talked to Duden?” “He wouldn’t like that. He’s retiring, and emerituses don’t get grants the way they used to. He needs this. His career hasn’t had many successes.”
ref: 2016, Christopher Bernard, Voyage to a Phantom City, Berkeley, Calif.: Regent Press, →ISBN, page 70:
coordinate_terms: emerita
glosses: A (male) person who is retired from active service or an occupation, especially one who retains an honorific version of a previous title.
examples: text: With a string of “emerituses” behind his name, last of which was acquired with the Welfare society resignation, [George Q.] Sheppard now lives in retirement in his home at The Hill, 722 King street.
ref: 1941 May 31, Bob Zissa, “Typewriter Becomes His Best Pal: ‘It’s Easy to Learn to Loaf’, Declares Retired Hill Master”, in Pottstown Mercury, volume 10, number 210, Pottstown, Pa., page one, column 7:
text: NOW THE VENERABLE and distinguished First National Bank bossman has joined a distinguished league. To my knowledge, he shares his honors with two other distinguished Orlandoans — Dr. J. Powell Tucker, pastor emeritus of the First Baptist Church, and J. C. Brossier, editor emeritus of the Orlando Evening Star. And now that Dr. and Mrs. Tucker have returned home from a month’s vacation trip, the good doctor can sit down today with Mr. Allen and Mr. Brossier and they can talk about their emerituses.
ref: 1961 August 15, Charlie Wadsworth, “Hush Puppies”, in Orlando Sentinel, volume 77, number 93, Orlando, Fla., pages 4—B, column 1:
text: Marshall Keeble, president emeritus of Nashville Christian Institute, and A. M. Burton, president emeritus of Life & Casualty Insurance, have more in common than their age (85), their frequent meetings or their emerituses.
ref: 1964 March 29, George Barker, “Brother Keeble and the Lord”, in The Nashville Tennessean Sunday Magazine, page 6, column 1:
text: NOW THE holder of numerous emerituses and honorary titles in recognition of her long service, Mrs. [Chalmers W.] Hutchison [a.k.a. Bessie Hutchison] still has not retired from her lively interest in all things that are “moving” nor from watching the contemporary scene.
ref: 1966 September 19, Pauline Naylor, “90 Years Don’t Fetter Interest”, in Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 86th year, number 231, page 3-B, column 1:
text: He was also a visiting professor of chemical engineering, and received an Emeritus in 1967.
ref: 1976, A History of Temple, New Hampshire, 1768-1976, Dublin, N.H.: William L. Bauhan, →ISBN, page 473:
text: After receiving her emeritus in 1976 she has lectured at the University of Berkeley, and University of Vienna.
ref: 1981, First International Congress on the History of Turkish-Islamic Science and Technology, 14-18 September 1981, page 18:
text: After obtaining his emeritus in 1953, he returned to Germany and lived in Bad Pyrmont.
ref: 1984, Elisabeth Heisenberg, Inner Exile: Recollections of a Life with Werner Heisenberg, Birkhäuser, →ISBN, page 161:
text: He continued there after his emeritus in 1921 until his death in 1934.
ref: 1986, Mitteilungen der Österreichischen Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften, page 33:
text: I see Dr Solly Ozrovech whom I have known for years, a fine person, has now received his Emeritus.
ref: 1991 April 23, Debates of Parliament, Cape Town: The Government Printer, […], columns 6381–6382:
text: Rev Mr Hilkowitz left Paarl in 1914 to settle in England and was succeeded as minister of the congregation in 1915 by the Rev Hillel Strelitz (see below), who served the community for 25 years before receiving his emeritus in 1941.
ref: 1993, Charles Press, The Light of Israel: The Story of the Paarl Jewish Community, Paarl: Jubilee Publications, →ISBN, page 47:
text: Appointed Professor at the Collège de France in 1947, in the Chair of differential and functional equations, that he occupies till his emeritus in 1978, Leray developes^([sic]) till 1950 his ideas on the cohomology of closed continuous maps, fiber spaces and Lie groups (Leray-Hirsch theorem) [12], [13], and continues his work in fluid mechanics by contributing to the theory of airplane wings [11], in the line of Tchapliguine and Prandtl’s work.
ref: 1998, Topological Methods in Nonlinear Analysis, page 201:
text: In 1926 he [Hermann Staudinger] accepted a position at the University of Freiburg, as Head of the Laboratory of Chemistry, and remained there until his emeritus in 1951.
ref: 2003, “[1953] Staudinger, Hermann”, in Francis Leroy, editor, A Century of Nobel Prize Recipients: Chemistry, Physics, and Medicine, Marcel Dekker, →ISBN, page 54, column 2:
text: Born in Vienna, where he remained until his emeritus in 1989.
ref: 2003, Sociological Abstracts, page 3385:
text: From 1985 until the time of his emeritus in 1994 he was professor of sanitary engineering – particularly in relation to public drinking water supply matters – at Delft University of Technology.
ref: 2008, Wim Ravesteijn, Jan Kop, editors, For Profit and Prosperity: The Contribution Made by Dutch Engineers to Public Works in Indonesia, 1800-2000, Aprilis, →ISBN, page 553:
text: When [Gerhard Herman Johannes Wilhelm Jacobus Geesink] Geesink departed with his emeritus, the Faculty of Letters wanted to make something of it and proposed a successor: [Dirk Hendrik Theodoor] Vollenhoven or J[ohan]. G[erhard]. Ubbink, with special recommendation of the first of these. […] [Cornelis] Van Gelderen was able to depart at last with his emeritus in 1945, [Gerhard Charles] Aalders and [Valentijn] Hepp followed in 1950.
ref: 2008, Arie van Deursen, translated by Herbert Donald Morton, The Distinctive Character of the Free University in Amsterdam, 1880-2005: A Commemorative History, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., →ISBN, pages 108 ([[Inherit or Borrow: 1905-1926] Science] Letters and philosophy) and 219 ([[Christian Scholarship: 1926-1955] Onward along the old track?] Scholarship in the faculties):
qualifier: plural emerituses
glosses: An honorific version of a previous title.
Related terms: emerita
emeritum
emeritate