Neighbor

How to spell neighbor

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce neighbor

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does neighbor mean?

1. nounA person who lives near or next to another.

Neighbor in a sentence

• My neighbor is very kind.

• Our neighbor keeps the front garden beautiful.

Where does neighbor come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word comes from the Old English neahgebur, a compound built from neah, meaning 'near' or 'nigh', and gebur, meaning 'dweller' or 'farmer'. So a neighbor was quite literally a 'near-dweller', someone who farmed or lived close by. The same gebur element survives faintly in the old word 'boor', which once simply meant a peasant farmer before it gained its rude modern sense. The American spelling 'neighbor' drops the British 'u' in the ending, part of the broad nineteenth-century simplification of '-our' words to '-or' championed by Noah Webster. The silent 'gh' in the middle is the real spelling trap; it is a fossil of the hard guttural sound the word once had in Old and Middle English.

How the word is built

• neigh (from Old English neah: near)
• bor (from gebur: dweller, farmer)

British and American spelling

Neighbor is the American spelling. British English spells it neighbour.