Patio

How to spell patio

5 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce patio

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does patio mean?

1. nounA paved area immediately outside a house, used for sitting, dining, or relaxing outdoors.

Patio in a sentence

• They laid new flagstones across the patio before summer.

• We ate breakfast on the patio while the sun came up.

Where does patio come from?

Language of origin: Spanish

Patio came into English in the early 1800s directly from Spanish, where patio means an inner courtyard, the open paved space at the centre of a house. The Spanish word is of uncertain earlier origin, though many scholars connect it to the Old Provencal or Old Occitan word pati, meaning a pasture or piece of untilled ground, which itself may go back to the Latin pactum, meaning an agreement or pact (a parcel of land marked out by agreement). English first used patio to describe the Spanish-style courtyards of homes in Spain and the Americas, and over the twentieth century the sense broadened to any paved area beside a house used for sitting and dining outdoors. Because the word was taken in whole from Spanish, its spelling stays neat and phonetic, but the tricky part for English writers is the -tio ending, where the t is pronounced like an sh and the io reads as a single ee-oh glide.

How the word is built

• patio (borrowed whole from Spanish: inner courtyard); no separable English prefix or suffix