Habitat

How to spell habitat

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce habitat

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does habitat mean?

1. nounThe natural environment in which a particular animal or plant normally lives.

Habitat in a sentence

• Draining the marsh destroyed the habitat of several rare birds.

• The panda's natural habitat is the bamboo forest of central China.

Where does habitat come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes straight from Latin, where habitat literally means 'it dwells' or 'it inhabits', the third-person singular form of the verb habitare, 'to live in' or 'to occupy'. That verb was a frequentative built on habere, meaning 'to have' or 'to hold', so the underlying idea is of something that habitually holds or keeps a place. In the 1700s, naturalists writing in Latin used habitat as the opening word in descriptions of where a plant or animal was found, as in 'habitat in...' ('it lives in...'), and English readers simply lifted that single Latin verb out as a noun. By the early nineteenth century it had settled into ordinary English meaning the natural home of a living thing. The same habere root sits behind everyday relatives such as 'habit', 'inhabit', and 'exhibit', and remembering that family helps fix the single t and the -tat ending rather than a doubled or softened spelling.

How the word is built

• habit- (from Latin habitare: to dwell, to inhabit)
• -at (from the third-person verb form habitat: 'it dwells')