Estate

How to spell estate

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce estate

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does estate mean?

1. nounAn extensive area of land, usually with a large house, owned by one person or family.
2. nounAll the money, property, and possessions a person leaves when they die.
3. nounA planned area of houses or buildings built together, often by one developer or council.

Estate in a sentence

• The country estate covered hundreds of acres of woodland.

• Her solicitor was named executor of the estate.

• They grew up on a council estate on the edge of town.

• Workers maintained the gardens across the whole estate.

• The tax owed on his estate took months to calculate.

• The new housing estate added three hundred homes to the village.

Where does estate come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Estate descends from the Latin status, meaning 'condition, position, or standing', which itself grew from the verb stare, 'to stand'. It reached English in the 1200s through Old French estat, the same word that also gave us 'state'; the extra 'e' at the front reflects the Old French habit of propping up an initial 's' followed by a consonant. Early on it meant a person's general condition or rank in life, which is why medieval society spoke of the 'three estates' of clergy, nobility, and commoners. From the idea of a person's standing it shifted to mean the wealth and property that defined that standing, and from there to landed property in particular. The modern British senses, a large country property or a planned group of houses, all trace back to that same notion of holdings, while the legal sense of everything a dead person leaves behind preserves the older 'total condition of one's wealth' meaning.

How the word is built

• e- (from ex-: out)
• stat (from Latin status: condition, standing)
• -e