I'm not at all a fan of the modern use of the word "learnings" in place of what could be called lessons or takeaways. I wondered what led to seeing this all-too-often in business communication. I decided to see what I can glean about it from generative AI.
ChatGPT
I started with ChatGPT and got the following response:
📜 1. Historical origin of “learnings”
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Old English already had leornung (“learning, knowledge obtained by study”).
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“Learnings” appears intermittently in Middle English and Early Modern English, but mostly in the sense of knowledge or scholarship, not “takeaways.”
So the plural form is historically attested, but the modern meaning is new.
📈 2. When did “learnings” (meaning “takeaways”) take off?
Linguists and corpus researchers note that:
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The usage begins to appear in the 1970s–80s in fields like education, psychology, organizational development, and management consulting.
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It becomes much more widespread after the 1990s, especially in:
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Corporate training
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Agile/software development
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Post-mortem analyses (“What were the key learnings?”)
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By the early 2000s, it was common in business English; by the 2010s, it had firmly entered corporate jargon.
💬 3. Why was this term coined (or revived)?
Several reasons:
✔ 1. Jargon need in organizational development
Fields like management consulting, OD, and “lessons learned” methodology wanted a compact noun for:
“knowledge gained from experience, not just from instruction.”
“Lesson” felt too teacher-student oriented; “takeaway” too informal.
✔ 2. Influence of corporate and academic training culture
Training programs often talk about:
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learnings,
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key learnings,
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actionable learnings.
The plural makes it feel like a measurable, list-friendly deliverable.
✔ 3. Analogy with words like “findings”
Consulting and research language uses many “-ings” nouns:
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findings
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earnings
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savings
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outcomes (a parallel)
“Learnings” fit the pattern of a concrete output after an event or analysis.
✔ 4. Global business English spread
Because English is used by many non-native speakers in international companies, simplified or regularized forms often spread.
“Learnings” works grammatically for learners who think:
verb → noun with “-ing” → plural is okay.
🚫 4. Why do some people dislike it?
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For many native speakers, “learnings” sounds ungrammatical or like jargon.
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They prefer:
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lessons
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takeaways
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insights
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Style guides (The Economist, AP, etc.) often recommend avoiding “learnings” unless quoting business jargon.
Claude's take
I then put the same question to Claude and got this response written out in paragraph form rather than bullet format with two citations, albeit from the same source. Also note that it does not throw in emojis like the other two do:
Based on my search, "learnings" has an interesting history. While the word itself dates back to the 14th century and was commonly used through the 18th century (Shakespeare even used it in Cymbeline), it surged in popularity during the 1950s in business jargon and educational contexts CSMonitor.com.
The term wasn't really "coined" in the modern sense—it was actually revived. From the 1400s through the 1700s, "learnings" meant "lessons" or "instructions" and was perfectly acceptable. However, it fell out of common use in the 19th and 20th centuries.
When it resurged in the 1950s, it took on a slightly different meaning in corporate and academic settings, essentially as a synonym for "findings," "conclusions," "results," or "takeaways." This revival happened as business jargon and corporate speak were developing their own vocabulary.
Today, learnings is widely viewed as pretentious and useless business jargon CSMonitor.com, appearing on countless lists of annoying corporate terminology. Despite this criticism, it has become firmly established in business, academic, and scientific contexts. The irony is that people generally have no problem with "teachings" (what is taught), but "learnings" (what is learned) somehow grates on many ears.
So it wasn't so much coined as it was resurrected from older English and repurposed for modern business speak—which is perhaps why it feels both familiar and oddly wrong to many people.
Google Gemini
To round out the experiment, I also posed the question to Google Gemini, which is closer to ChatGPT in style of presentation. however, it fails to grasp how much some of us hate the term. This is its response:
The word "learnings," particularly as a plural noun replacing terms like "lessons" or "takeaways," saw a significant increase in use as a corporate and educational buzzword starting around the year 2000.
However, it's important to note that the word itself is not new.
🗓️ Timeline of Usage
Middle/Early Modern English (14th - 17th Century): The noun "learning" meaning "a thing learned" (a countable sense) and its plural, "learnings," were in occasional use. Shakespeare, for example, used the term.
1950s: The term saw an increase in use within academic and educational circles (often referred to as "edu-speak").
Circa 2000: It became a widespread buzzword in business-speak (corporate jargon), commonly appearing in phrases like "key learnings" or "apply these learnings." This is when it really started replacing "lessons learned" or "takeaways" in project management and professional contexts.
🤔 Why Was the Term Coined/Revived?
While "learnings" is often considered unnecessary jargon by language purists, its resurgence and adoption in business contexts appear to stem from a perceived need for a different nuance than existing words:
To Distinguish from "Lessons": The word "lessons" can carry connotations of being taught (as in a classroom lesson) or of something learned from a failure (as in "we learned our lesson"). "Learnings" is sometimes used to refer to insights or knowledge gained through experience or a process, often in a less painful or formal way.
To Merge Concepts: In corporate and project environments, "learnings" acts as a shorthand to combine the idea of "things we've learned as a team" and "action items" or "next steps." It is intended to imply a list of actionable insights or points of wisdom distilled from an experience.
Corporate Trend: It is part of a broader trend of turning verbs into nouns in corporate language ("What's the ask?" or "What's the solve?"). The plural "learnings" parallels other accepted plural nouns derived from verbal actions, such as findings and teachings.
Essentially, its modern rise is largely attributed to it becoming a recognizable piece of corporate jargon that differentiates the knowledge gained from the traditional, sometimes rigid, sense of a "lesson."
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The information from all three is consistent, so we don't have the problem of AI hallucinations here. However, Gemini seems to ignore the fact that many people hate the use of this jargon, considering it pretentious, as Claude points out. It also omits that it's not recommended for use in publications, as per ChatGPT's citation. Perhaps that's a reflection of Google's own corporate culture and form of communication.
Related: https://writewaypro.blogspot.com/2024/06/a-new-generative-ai-comparison.html
Posts
This week on LinkedIn, someone posted a picture of a sign for a store urging customers to place holiday orders now. The poster said she would cut out some of the words. That reminded me of an old joke. How old is it? I looked it up and discovered that it was printed as early as 1890. Here's how it goes: