Area

How to spell area

4 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce area

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does area mean?

1. nounA particular part of a place, surface, or region, or the extent of a surface measured in square units.

Area in a sentence

• The waiting area near the entrance was crowded all morning.

• Builders measured the floor area before ordering the tiles.

Where does area come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes straight from the Latin area, which meant a piece of open, level ground, especially a vacant courtyard, a threshing floor, or an empty plot beside a building. Roman writers used it for any flat, cleared surface, and from that physical sense the idea of a bounded region naturally followed. English took the word directly from Latin in the sixteenth century, keeping the original spelling intact, which is why it ends in the slightly awkward sequence of vowels '-ea'. By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it had also acquired its mathematical meaning, the measure of how much surface a shape covers, a use that still dominates geometry today. The same Latin root sits behind the rarer English word 'areola', a small ring-shaped area, which preserves the diminutive form. The main spelling trap is purely auditory: the unstressed ending sounds like a vague 'ee-uh', giving no clue that it is written '-rea'.

How the word is built

• area (from Latin: a level open space); a single unanalysable root borrowed whole, with no prefix or suffix