Courtyard

How to spell courtyard

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce courtyard

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does courtyard mean?

1. nounAn open area enclosed by the walls of a building or by surrounding buildings.

Courtyard in a sentence

• The apartments share a quiet courtyard with a fountain in the middle.

• Guests gathered in the hotel courtyard for the evening reception.

Where does courtyard come from?

Language of origin: French

This is a compound of two older words, 'court' and 'yard', both of which carry the idea of an enclosed space. 'Court' came into English through Old French 'cort' from the Latin 'cohors', which originally meant an enclosed yard or pen and later the body of people gathered in such a space, giving us the royal 'court' as well. 'Yard' is a native English word from the Old English 'geard', meaning an enclosure or fenced piece of ground, and it shares a distant root with the word 'garden'. The two were joined in the 1500s to name an open area enclosed by the walls of a building or buildings. Because both halves independently mean roughly the same thing, the compound is almost emphatically 'an enclosed enclosure', which is a handy way to remember that it keeps both whole words intact: court + yard, with no letters lost where they meet.

How the word is built

• court (an enclosed space, from Latin cohors)
• yard (an enclosed piece of ground, from Old English geard)