learned

learned, scholarly, erudite are comparable when they mean possessing or manifesting unusually wide and deep knowledge.

Learned implies the possession of knowledge gained by study and research; it usually implies wider and deeper knowledge than do such words as educated, cultivated, and cultured, and is usually applied to those who are conspicuous in their class or profession for learning, to associations composed of such persons, to books or articles written by them, and to periodicals edited by them or publishing articles by them

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the learned professions

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learned journals

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colloquialisms which I should not indulge in, were I reading a formal paper before a learned society— Lowes

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he is, in the true sense of the term, learned. He reads Greek and Latin easily. He can recite poetry in seven languages— Book-of-the-Month Club News

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Scholarly also implies learning, but it is applied particularly to persons or to the utterances, ideas, and writings of persons who have attained mastery in a field of study or investigation, who have to a greater or lesser extent advanced knowledge in that field, and who have exhibited consistently high standards in the appraisal of their own and others' discoveries

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never academic—still less pedantic—but always scholarly; with the effect of profound learning ever so lightly worn— Storrs

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Often, more narrowly, the term implies great care for accuracy or exactness

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a scholarly study of the causes of the war

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,scholarly pursuits

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this biography ... is scholarly to the point of being unreadable, with footnotes covering half the space— New Yorker

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Erudite, though often employed as an equivalent of learned or scholarly, usually implies a love of learning for its own sake, a taste for what is out-of-the-way or remote from the interests of the average well-read man, and often an inordinately wide range of knowledge

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the point of view of a profound and erudite student, with a deep belief in the efficacy of useless knowledge— Benson

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that excellent critic, the late Mr. Walkley, was often spoken of as erudite, because his charming quotations gave so many readers a feeling of having to do with a man who had all literature at his command— Montague

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Analogous words: cultivated, cultured (see corresponding nouns at CULTURE): *pedantic, academic, scholastic, bookish: *recondite, abstruse, esoteric

Contrasted words: illiterate, unlettered, uneducated, unlearned, untutored, *ignorant