[jxub]

Interestingly college comes from the eponymous word in 14th century French [1] and the French term from Latin collegium.

On the other hand, collage comes from coller in Old French and this one from kolla in Ancient Greek.

It's a strange quirk of history that two such simillar words have such different origins.

[1] https://www.etymonline.com/word/college

[2] https://www.etymonline.com/word/collage

[tbassetto]

And to add some confusion, the French word “collège” is roughly the equivalent of middle school…

[jxub]

This rabbit hole goes deep... In Castillian Spanish "colegio" is often used for primary school, but sometimes as a placeholder name for any kind of compulsory education from preschool up to high school (sometimes in the shortened form "cole").

[CPLX]

While in Spanish colegio is the equivalent of high school.

[kgwgk]

It can also be primary school. In Spain, high school is instituto.

And escuela, like ecole in French or school in English, can refer to primary school or higher education institutions.

[chrisweekly]

And in German, "gymnasium" is high school.

(No wonder the Germans do so well in sports!)

/jk

[jxub]

In Poland "gimnazjum" used to be middle school until recently when the 8 year primary school system was restored because of heavy critique.

[raverbashing]

college (n.)

late 14c., "organized association of persons invested with certain powers and rights or engaged in some common duty or pursuit,"

From where expressions like "electoral college" come from

I wonder if there's a linguistic term for having a broad term become a more specific one (in some occasions like this)

Another interesting term is Faculty, which meant "branch of knowledge" then finally became "the group of teachers/professors in an educational institution" https://www.etymonline.com/word/faculty

[thaumasiotes]

> I wonder if there's a linguistic term for having a broad term become a more specific one (in some occasions like this)

Almost certainly there is, but if I ever learned it I can't bring it to mind.

This would be an example of the more general phenomenon "semantic shift", though.

Edit: a quick Google search suggests that this particular shift is known fairly intuitively as "semantic narrowing".

[grkvlt]

Interesting, in the UK (in fact, most of the world except the USA, I think) the term Faculty still means a branch of a university dealing with a particular subject group, like 'Faculty of Arts' or 'Faculty of Science' with departments arranged under the Faculties. It's always odd to me seeing e.g. the teachers at a kids school referred to as 'Faculty' on American TV shows!