Outdoors

How to spell outdoors

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce outdoors

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does outdoors mean?

1. adverbIn or into the open air, outside any building.
2. nounThe world outside buildings; the open countryside or natural environment.

Outdoors in a sentence

• adverb

  The children spent the whole afternoon playing outdoors.

• noun

  After years in an office, he longed for the outdoors.

• adverb

  It was warm enough to eat lunch outdoors on the patio.

• noun

  The magazine celebrates camping, hiking, and the great outdoors.

Where does outdoors come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is a transparently English compound built from the native Old English elements 'out' and 'door'. The 'door' part descends from Old English 'duru', meaning a gate or entrance, which has cousins across the Germanic languages and ultimately traces back to the same ancient root that gave Latin 'foris' (a door) and Greek 'thura'. The little '-s' on the end is not a plural at all but a fossilised adverbial genitive, the same trailing 's' that survives in words like 'always', 'besides', and 'towards'. The pairing emerged in English from the older phrase 'out of doors', which by the 1800s had been compressed into the single word 'outdoors'. Because that '-s' feels grammatically odd to modern eyes, writers sometimes drop it or confuse the adverb with the adjective form 'outdoor', which has no 's'.

How the word is built

• out- (outside, away from)
• door (entrance, from Old English duru)
• -s (adverbial genitive ending)