as in nerd
a person slavishly devoted to intellectual or academic pursuits
every time he begged off a night at the pub—saying he had to study—his mates teased him for being a swot
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Recent Examples of swot
Ruby Tandoh,
New Yorker,
25 Aug. 2025
The Economist,
13 June 2020
Greenblatt might want to have a chinwag with some of his colleagues in the history department and swot up the biography of someone like Wisconsin’s Robert La Follette, a progressive populist politician perhaps more to his liking.
—
Alex Beam,
BostonGlobe.com,
2 May 2018
Noun
Nobody talked about the furtive ambition of the swots.
—
Ruby Tandoh,
New Yorker,
25 Aug. 2025
Verb
Yamada Jun, the IT expert, became the CEO and travelled to Germany to swot up on renewables.
—
The Economist,
13 June 2020
Greenblatt might want to have a chinwag with some of his colleagues in the history department and swot up the biography of someone like Wisconsin’s Robert La Follette, a progressive populist politician perhaps more to his liking.
—
Alex Beam,
BostonGlobe.com,
2 May 2018
Recent Examples of Synonyms for swot
Noun
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In the film, the villain is not the Harvard nerds who initially shun Elle, but the ex-boyfriend who never saw her as anything more than a cardboard cutout of a girl with blonde hair and big boobs.
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Hunter Pence, a nerd at heart, spent money from his first paycheck to buy himself a gaming computer to play World of Warcraft.
Verb
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Cisco has built and is refining an AI tool for investor relations that analyzes its financial history alongside competitors’ earnings calls and can anticipate likely questions from specific analysts.
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In the new study published in JAMA Internal Medicine, researchers analyzed electronic health records from 2001 to 2023 for more than 700,000 pairs of mothers and children in Hong Kong.
Noun
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The weekend-afternoon sales events became a phenomenon, drawing crowds to marvel at his wide-ranging tastes — not just hardcore music geeks or bibliophiles, but appreciators of New York cultural lore.
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By now, however, most know him as the lovable, cello-playing geek Leonard Hofstadter who married the pretty blonde waitress.
Verb
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The populace can only deduce that either Putin is responsible or the elites around him are insulating him from realizing and rectifying the situation.
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Knowing the entire sequence — the order of all 3 billion or so of our DNA’s chemical building blocks, nearly fully deduced by the international Human Genome Project between 1990 and 2003 — hasn’t helped much.
Verb
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Two years later, Kingswill is now studying civil engineering at UC Davis.
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The origins of Gymshark can be traced back to 2012, when Francis was still a teenager, studying by day at Birmingham’s Aston University, delivering pizzas for Pizza Hut at night and spending his free time at the gym.
Verb
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Jacinto found out the truth about his work after becoming suspicious of some of the girls who would accompany his cousins to their home.
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Amora needs to find out what Sincere told Melanie about their Casa connection and warn Melanie, if possible, that Sincere was treating Casa Amor like a hall pass.
Verb
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Anyone who thinks that the differences between these sects are minor is invited to read about the wars, massacres and persecutions that erupted between them in the 16th and 17th centuries.
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Others may miss the warmth of a person who can read the room, handle a strange request or help when something goes wrong.
Verb
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Hawkins, 38, will end his 13-year run as Officer Kevin Atwater on the popular NBC show during the show's upcoming Season 14 in October, USA TODAY has learned.
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Sensors read a physiological signal, feed it back in real time, and the user learns to nudge it in a calmer direction.
Cite this Entry
“Swot.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/swot. Accessed 7 Jul. 2026.
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