Land

How to spell land

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce land

What does land mean?

1. nounThe solid part of the earth's surface, or an area of ground regarded as property or territory.
2. verbTo come down to rest on a surface, or to secure or achieve something successfully.

Land in a sentence

• noun

  The farmer owns several acres of fertile land near the river.

• verb

  The pilot will land the plane once the runway is clear.

• noun

  After weeks at sea, the sailors were relieved to reach dry land.

• verb

  She worked hard to land a contract with the new client.

Where does land come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Land is a thoroughly native English word, inherited directly from the Old English 'land', which meant earth, ground, soil, or a defined territory belonging to a people. It traces back through the common Germanic root that also gave Dutch 'land' and German 'Land', and is connected to an older Indo-European notion of an open or enclosed stretch of ground. From the earliest records the word carried both the physical sense of solid earth as opposed to sea, and the political sense of a country or realm, which is why we still speak of dry land and of foreign lands. The verb sense, meaning to bring or come to ground, grew naturally from the noun and was reinforced by maritime use, where to land meant to put ashore from a ship. Because it is short and phonetically regular, the spelling has stayed remarkably stable for over a thousand years.

How the word is built

• land (Old English: earth, ground, country); a single root word with no affixes