interdisciplinary

interdisciplinary — adjective

1. relating to work or study that combines ideas, methods, and knowledge from more

1.adjectiveC1
Definition

relating to work or study that combines ideas, methods, and knowledge from more than one academic field or subject area.

Example

The university launched an interdisciplinary program where students study biology and computer science.

collocation: interdisciplinary program

Dr. Okafor's interdisciplinary research on water quality brings together chemistry, engineering, and public policy.

collocation: interdisciplinary research

Common collocations
  • interdisciplinary approach
  • interdisciplinary research
  • interdisciplinary program
  • interdisciplinary team
  • interdisciplinary studies
  • interdisciplinary work
  • interdisciplinary course
  • interdisciplinary project
Synonyms
  • cross-disciplinary

    similar meaning but slightly weaker in suggesting active integration between fields

  • multidisciplinary

    emphasises multiple fields working alongside each other rather than blending methods

  • integrative

    broader term that can apply to any combination of elements, not limited to academic subjects

Antonyms

Grammar Patterns

interdisciplinary + noun

be + interdisciplinary

Usage Note

Almost always used attributively (before a noun) in academic or professional contexts. Less common as a predicative adjective ('this work is interdisciplinary'). The noun form interdisciplinarity is rare and limited to scholarly writing.

Common Mistakes

The course is interdisciplinarian.
The course is interdisciplinary.
interdisciplinarian is not a standard English word.
She works interdisciplinarily on the project.
She takes an interdisciplinary approach to the project.
the adverb interdisciplinarily is extremely rare; use an adjective+noun structure instead.

Word family

Synonym discussion

Sense: adjective/1

These four terms describe how academic fields relate to one another, but they differ in the depth of integration. Multidisciplinary work places several disciplines side by side — each contributes its perspective without fundamentally changing its methods. Interdisciplinary work goes further: it actively blends concepts and tools from different fields to create a unified approach. Cross-disciplinary typically means viewing one field through the lens of another (e.g., applying economics to legal questions). Transdisciplinary is the strongest term, describing work that transcends individual disciplines entirely to create new frameworks that no single field owns. For example, a multidisciplinary climate project might have a climatologist, an economist, and a political scientist each writing separate chapters; an interdisciplinary study would fuse their methods into one analysis.

multidisciplinary ↗cross-disciplinarytransdisciplinary

Common collocations

Adverbs

Phrases

  • at the interdisciplinary level
  • from an interdisciplinary perspective

Etymology

LatinEnglish

Formed from the prefix inter- ('between, among'), the noun discipline ('a branch of knowledge'), and the suffix -ary ('relating to'). The word first appeared in English in the 1930s, shaped by the growth of university departments that needed to collaborate across traditional subject boundaries. It followed the earlier model of multidisciplinary (1920s).