Localities

How to spell localities

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce localities

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does localities mean?

1. nounParticular areas, districts, or neighbourhoods, especially considered in relation to where something is situated.

Localities in a sentence

• The survey compared house prices across several rural localities.

• The disease was confined to a handful of coastal localities.

Where does localities come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin locus, meaning simply 'a place' or 'a spot', which also gave English everyday words such as 'locate', 'location', and 'allocate'. From locus came the Latin adjective localis, 'belonging to a place', and from that the medieval Latin noun localitas, describing the condition of occupying a particular place. English borrowed the singular 'locality' in the early 1600s, at first in the abstract sense of 'the fact of having a position in space', and only later did it settle into the familiar concrete meaning of a district or neighbourhood. The plural 'localities' simply adds the regular -ies ending used for nouns finishing in a consonant plus -y. The spelling trap sits in the unstressed middle: the schwa in 'local-i-ties' hides the i that the -ity suffix demands, and writers must remember the single l after the o.

How the word is built

• loc (place)
• -al (adjective)
• -ity (noun: state/quality)
• -ies (plural)