Immigrant

How to spell immigrant

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce immigrant

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does immigrant mean?

1. nounA person who comes to live permanently in a country that is not their country of birth.
2. adjectiveRelating to or characteristic of people who have come to settle in a new country.

Immigrant in a sentence

• noun

  Every immigrant in the queue carried documents for the residency interview.

• adjective

  The museum documents the immigrant communities that built the harbour district.

• noun

  Her grandfather arrived as a young immigrant with little money and no English.

• adjective

  Much of the region's cuisine reflects its immigrant heritage.

Where does immigrant come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb immigrare, meaning 'to move into' or 'to settle in a place', which was built from the prefix in- (here meaning 'into', assimilated to im- before the m) and the verb migrare, meaning 'to move from one place to another'. The form 'immigrant' comes from immigrans, the present participle, so it literally names a person 'moving in'. English adopted it in the eighteenth century, a little later than its mirror word 'emigrant', which uses the prefix e- meaning 'out of'. The pairing is the whole spelling story: an immigrant moves IN (note the doubled m from im- meeting migr), while an emigrant moves OUT with a single m. The same migrare root also gives us 'migrate' and 'migration', and keeping that root visible helps explain why the m doubles only when the 'into' prefix is attached.

How the word is built

• im- (variant of in-: into)
• migr (from migrare: to move, migrate)
• -ant (agent-noun suffix: one who does)