District

How to spell district

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce district

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does district mean?

1. nounA defined area of a town, region, or country, often marked out for administrative, electoral, or descriptive purposes.

District in a sentence

• The new shopping centre is in the financial district of the city.

• Council funding was split evenly across every district in the county.

Where does district come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the medieval Latin districtus, meaning the territory within which a lord had the right to enforce justice and compel obedience. That noun grew out of the Latin verb distringere, literally 'to draw apart' or 'to bind tightly', built from the intensive prefix dis- and stringere, meaning 'to pull tight' or 'to constrain' (the same root that gives us 'strict', 'strain', and 'stringent'). The original sense centred on the area over which authority could be exercised, since a ruler could legally restrain people within those bounds. English borrowed it through French in the seventeenth century, at first for a unit of feudal jurisdiction, before it softened into the modern, neutral meaning of a defined region of a town, country, or administrative system. The hidden 'strict' inside 'district' is a useful spelling anchor, since both words share that 'str' cluster from stringere.

How the word is built

• di- (intensive, from dis-: apart)
• strict (from stringere: to draw tight, bind)
• (noun via Latin districtus: territory of jurisdiction)