learning is the act or process of acquiring knowledge or skill through study, instruction, or experience — and also the knowledge so acquired, the sense preserved in "a person of great learning."
The word names both a process and its result. As a process it describes the change in a learner: learning a language, learning from a mistake. As a result it means accumulated knowledge or scholarship, now slightly formal. In psychology it carries a technical sense, the modification of behavior through experience, and computing borrowed that sense for 📝Machine Learning (ML), where a system improves its performance from data rather than explicit instruction.
Learning is the verbal noun of 📝learn, from Old English leornung, built on leornian, "to get knowledge, study." The verb traces through Proto-Germanic to a Proto-Indo-European root meaning "furrow, track," and shares its ancestry with lore. The image beneath the word is following a trail rather than receiving a deposit. The adjective learned, pronounced as two syllables, keeps the older sense of having knowledge gained by study.
Learning is distinct from teaching and education, which describe knowledge being imparted; learning describes what happens in the learner, whether or not anyone is teaching. 📝Intrinsically Motivated Learning is its self-driven form, pursued for its own sake rather than for outside reward. 📝Unlearning For Change Agents, a course from 📝Charles Eisenstein, treats the reverse movement, releasing inherited assumptions, as a precondition for change. At group scale the same process becomes 📝Organizational Learning, and the 📝Four Stages of Competence model the progression a single learner moves through toward mastery.