academic

adjective

1 an academic institution:

educational, scholastic, instructional, pedagogical;

school, college, collegiate, university.

2 he has a distinctly academic turn of mind:

scholarly, studious, literary, well read, intellectual, clever, erudite, learned, educated, cultured, bookish, highbrow, pedantic, donnish, cerebral, serious;

informal brainy;

dated lettered.

3 the debate has been largely academic:

theoretical, conceptual, notional, philosophical, unpragmatic, hypothetical, speculative, conjectural, conjectured, suppositional, putative;

indefinite, abstract, vague, general;

impractical, unrealistic, ivory-tower, irrelevant, useless;

rare suppositious, suppositive, ideational.

▷antonyms practical.

noun

a group of Russian academics is researching this phenomenon:

scholar, lecturer, don, teacher, educator, instructor, trainer, tutor, professor, fellow, man/woman of letters, highbrow, thinker, bluestocking;

informal egghead, bookworm;

archaic pedagogue.