Neighborhood

How to spell neighborhood

12 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce neighborhood

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does neighborhood mean?

1. nounA district or area within a town or city, especially considered in terms of the people who live there.

Neighborhood in a sentence

• They moved to a quieter neighborhood after their second child was born.

• The new bakery quickly became a favorite spot in the neighborhood.

Where does neighborhood come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word grows from the Old English neahgebur, a compound of neah meaning 'near' and gebur meaning 'a dweller' or 'farmer', so a neighbor was quite literally the person who lived nearby. The abstract ending -hood comes from the Old English had, which once meant 'condition, rank, or quality' and survives today in words like childhood and brotherhood. Joined together, the term came to describe the state of living close to others and then the district itself where those near-dwellers lived. The American spelling drops the u that British and Canadian writers keep in 'neighbourhood', a difference that traces to Noah Webster's nineteenth-century reforms streamlining -our endings to -or. The silent 'gh' in the middle, a fossil of an old guttural sound long gone from speech, is the part that most often trips up modern writers.

How the word is built

• neighbor (from Old English neah 'near'
• gebur 'dweller, farmer')
• -hood (state or condition, from Old English -had)

British and American spelling

Neighborhood is the American spelling. British English spells it neighbourhood.