Farmland

How to spell farmland

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce farmland

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does farmland mean?

1. nounLand that is used or suitable for growing crops or raising livestock.

Farmland in a sentence

• The new motorway will cut straight through fertile farmland.

• Developers bought up acres of farmland to build housing.

Where does farmland come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent English compound built from two very old native words. 'Farm' came into English through Old French ferme, from the medieval Latin firma, meaning a fixed payment or rent; it originally described land held in exchange for a fixed rent, and only later shifted to mean the agricultural holding itself. 'Land' is a far older word, inherited directly from Old English land and shared across the Germanic family, where it meant ground, earth, or a defined territory. The two were joined to form 'farmland' as a plain descriptive compound, recorded in English from around the early nineteenth century. Because both halves are spelled exactly as they sound, the only thing to remember is that it is written as one solid word, with no space and no hyphen.

How the word is built

• farm (an area of cultivated land)
• land (ground, territory)