means Either money awarded to a student to help pay for education, or the serious, methodical pursuit and body of academic knowledge produced by scholars.

from Built on 'scholar' plus the suffix '-ship' — the same '-ship' that turns 'friend' into 'friendship,' marking a state or quality of being. 'Scholar' traces back through Old English 'scolere' to Late Latin 'scholaris,' a person of the school, and ultimately to Greek 'skholē' — which, delightfully, first meant 'leisure,' the free time the ancient Greeks believed you needed in order to think and learn. So buried in the word is the old idea that study is what you do when you're not forced to labor.