Occupancy

How to spell occupancy

9 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce occupancy

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does occupancy mean?

1. nounThe act of living in, using, or holding a building, room, or piece of land.

Occupancy in a sentence

• The lease sets out the date of occupancy for the new tenants.

• The hotel reported full occupancy over the holiday weekend.

Where does occupancy come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word traces back to the Latin verb occupare, which meant 'to seize', 'to take hold of', or 'to take possession of', built from the prefix ob- (over, towards) and capere (to take or grasp). In medieval and later Latin the related noun forms came to describe the act or fact of holding or living in a place. English took 'occupy' from Old French occuper in the 1300s, and the more technical noun 'occupancy', formed with the Latinate ending -ancy, emerged later, by the early 1600s, to name the condition of holding or inhabiting property. The same capere root surfaces in a crowd of familiar relatives such as 'capture', 'capable', and 'receive'. A useful spelling cue is the doubled c in the middle, which echoes the Latin occupare, while the ending is the soft -ancy rather than -ency.

How the word is built

• occup- (from Latin occupare: to seize, take possession of)
• -ancy (noun suffix denoting a state or condition)