Agrarian

How to spell agrarian

8 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce agrarian

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does agrarian mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to farmland, the ownership of land, or agriculture and rural life.

Agrarian in a sentence

• The country still has a largely agrarian economy built on small farms.

• The new tax mainly affected agrarian communities far from the cities.

Where does agrarian come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes from the Latin agrarius, meaning 'relating to land' or 'relating to fields', which was built on the noun ager, the everyday Latin word for a field, farmland, or open countryside. In Roman politics an 'agrarian law' (lex agraria) was specifically a measure for distributing public land among citizens, so the term carried a strong sense of land ownership and farming from the very start. English adopted it in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, first in just that legal and political sense and later broadening to describe anything connected with cultivated land, farming, or rural life. The same ager root sits inside the more disguised word 'agriculture', literally the 'cultivation of fields', and inside 'acre' as well, which helps explain the unexpected single g and the -ar- spelling that trips writers up. Remembering that ager simply meant a field anchors both the meaning and the awkward middle of the word.

How the word is built

• agr- (from Latin ager: field, land)
• -arian (adjective suffix meaning 'relating to')