Frontier

How to spell frontier

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce frontier

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does frontier mean?

1. nounA line or zone marking the boundary between two countries or regions.
2. nounThe furthest limit of what is currently known or developed in a field.

Frontier in a sentence

• The train slowed as it approached the frontier between the two countries.

• Researchers are pushing the frontier of cancer treatment with new gene therapies.

• Guards checked every passport at the frontier before letting cars through.

• Space exploration remains the final frontier for many scientists.

Where does frontier come from?

Language of origin: French

This word goes back to the Latin frons, meaning 'forehead' or 'front', and its stem front- which described the foremost part of anything. In medieval Latin a frontaria came to mean the front line of an army or the edge of a territory, the part that faces the enemy. Old French reshaped this into frontiere, meaning the borderland or the boundary of a country, and English borrowed it in the late 1300s. The original military sense, 'the part that fronts outward', is exactly why a frontier is the outer edge of settled land, and later, by extension, the outer limit of human knowledge. The same front- root sits inside everyday words like 'front', 'confront' and 'affront', which can help anchor that tricky -ier ending.

How the word is built

• front (front, forefront, from Latin frons: forehead)
• -ier (noun suffix denoting a thing or place)