mentor

Meanings

1. 1
   noun

   An experienced person who gives advice and guidance to someone less experienced.

   I've been lucky to have several great mentors in my career.

2. 2
   verb

   To advise and guide someone with less experience.

   The senior professor mentored me throughout university.

Simplified etymology

Mentor comes from Mentor, the character whose form the goddess Athene assumes in Homer’s Odyssey when guiding and advising Telemachus. The name may mean “adviser” or “counsel” and may be related to mind. Its modern general use was promoted by François Fénelon’s influential 1699 novel Les Aventures de Télémaque and its translations.

From French mentor, from Ancient Greek Μέντωρ (Méntōr, “Mentor”), a mythological character in the Odyssey, whose name, a historical name from Ancient Greece, shares the same root as English mind. Cognate to Sanskrit मन्तृ (mantṛ, “advisor, counselor”) and Latin monitor (“one who admonishes”), and perhaps ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *monéyeti (compare Latin moneō (“to warn”), causative form of *men- (“to think”).

Topics

External links

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• Cambridge Dictionary
• Wiktionary