Parkland

How to spell parkland

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce parkland

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does parkland mean?

1. nounOpen, grassy land with scattered trees, especially ground laid out as or resembling a park.

Parkland in a sentence

• The new housing estate borders several acres of protected parkland.

• Deer graze freely across the rolling parkland near the manor house.

Where does parkland come from?

Language of origin: French

This is a transparent compound of two familiar words, 'park' and 'land'. 'Park' came into English in the 1200s from the Old French 'parc', meaning an enclosed tract of ground, which itself traces back to the Medieval Latin 'parricus', an enclosure or paddock; the original sense was a fenced area of land set aside for keeping game animals for hunting. Only later did 'park' soften into the public green spaces and ornamental grounds we know today. 'Land' is the older, native element, an Old English and broadly Germanic word for ground or territory that has barely changed in form for over a thousand years. Joined together, 'parkland' describes open, grassy, lightly wooded ground of the kind found in or resembling a park, and because both parts are everyday words the spelling holds no real surprises.

How the word is built

• park (enclosed open ground)
• land (ground, territory)