Pluridisciplinarity

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The state of incorporating various fields of knowledge to enhance understanding
2. A characteristic of methods that unify insights from different academic domains to solve intricate problems
3. The quality of combining knowledge from several fields to approach complex issues

Etymology: Pluridisciplinarity is a modern coinage built from parts that each carry a long history. The core is "discipline", which comes from Latin "disciplina" meaning teaching or instruction, and which reached English through Old French and originally meant the training of a pupil rather than a field of study. The academic sense of a branch of knowledge developed later, so the word for combining several such branches is built on top of that narrower meaning. The word is made from "pluri-", a combining form drawn from Latin "plus" meaning "more", attached to "disciplinary", the adjective from "discipline", and then the suffix "-ity", which turns an adjective into a noun of quality or state. The result names the condition of drawing on several disciplines at once, which is why it is so often set beside its close relatives "interdisciplinarity" and "multidisciplinarity".