Neighbourhood

How to spell neighbourhood

13 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce neighbourhood

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does neighbourhood mean?

1. nounA district or area within a town or city, considered together with the people who live there.

Neighbourhood in a sentence

• They moved to a quieter neighbourhood after the second baby arrived.

• The new café has become a favourite spot for the whole neighbourhood.

Where does neighbourhood come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word grows from the Old English neahgebur, a compound of neah meaning 'near' and gebur meaning 'dweller' or 'farmer', so its literal sense was 'a person who lives nearby'. From that came neighbour, the person next door, and by the 1400s the abstract noun took the native English suffix -hood, which marks a state or a collective grouping (as in 'childhood' or 'brotherhood'). At first neighbourhood meant the friendly relations between neighbours, and only later did it settle into the modern sense of a district and the people who live in it. The British and Canadian spelling keeps the French-influenced -our seen in neighbour itself, a layer added when scribes reshaped many Old English -or endings under Norman influence; American English trims this to neighborhood. The lingering trap is that silent, unstressed -bour- in the middle, where the 'o' and 'u' are both easy to drop.

How the word is built

• neighbour (from Old English neahgebur: near-dweller)
• -hood (state or grouping)

British and American spelling

Neighbourhood is the British spelling. American English spells it neighborhood.