Landscape

How to spell landscape

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce landscape

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does landscape mean?

1. nounA large area of land considered for its visible features and overall appearance.
2. verbTo improve the appearance of a piece of ground by planting trees, shrubs, or laying out paths and lawns.
3. nounA format in which the width of a page or image is greater than its height.

Landscape in a sentence

• noun

  The train wound slowly through a snow-covered landscape of fields and hedges.

• verb

  The council hired a contractor to landscape the area around the new library.

• noun

  The spreadsheet printed better when she switched the page to landscape.

• noun

  Developers promised that the new houses would blend into the surrounding landscape.

• verb

  They spent the whole summer trying to landscape their bare back garden.

• noun

  Wide charts should be set in landscape rather than the usual upright format.

Where does landscape come from?

Language of origin: Dutch

This word came into English from Dutch in the late sixteenth century, originally as a technical term among painters. The Dutch form was landschap, built from land, meaning a region or stretch of ground, plus the suffix -schap, which marked a condition or collective state and is the cousin of the English ending -ship in words like friendship. Dutch masters were famous for their paintings of countryside scenery, so English borrowed landschap to name that genre of picture, first spelling it in various ways such as 'landskip' before the modern form settled. Only later did the meaning broaden from the painted view to the actual stretch of countryside itself, and later still to any general expanse, real or figurative. The -scape ending proved so useful that English went on to invent matching words like 'seascape' and 'cityscape'. The spelling trap is that buried 'd' in land, which is barely heard in speech, plus the 'sc' that has to follow it.

How the word is built

• land (ground, region)
• -scape (variant of Dutch -schap, a suffix denoting condition or view, related to English -ship)