Lifestyle

How to spell lifestyle

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce lifestyle

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does lifestyle mean?

1. nounThe typical way in which a person or group lives, including their habits, tastes, and spending.

Lifestyle in a sentence

• Moving to the coast gave them a slower, healthier lifestyle.

• The magazine covers travel, food, and lifestyle topics for busy professionals.

Where does lifestyle come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a modern compound built from two old pieces of English. The first part, 'life', goes back to the Old English 'lif', a native Germanic word meaning the condition of being alive or one's span of existence. The second part, 'style', came into English in the 1300s from the Latin 'stilus', the name for a pointed instrument used for writing on wax tablets; because a writer's individual handling of that stylus shaped how the writing looked, 'style' came to mean a characteristic manner of doing something. The blended word 'lifestyle' is much younger: it was popularised in the late 1920s, partly through the work of the Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler, who used it for the overall pattern of a person's habits and outlook. It only became an everyday consumer and marketing term in the 1960s and 1970s. The spelling is wholly transparent once you see the two parts, the only trap being the 'y' inside 'style', which traces straight back to that Latin writing tool.

How the word is built

• life (way of living)
• style (manner, fashion)