Plantation

How to spell plantation

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce plantation

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does plantation mean?

1. nounA large estate or farm on which a single crop, such as sugar, cotton, coffee, or rubber, is cultivated.
2. nounAn area where trees have been deliberately planted, especially for timber or commercial harvesting.

Plantation in a sentence

• The family had owned the sugar plantation for three generations.

• The pine plantation was felled and replanted on a twenty year cycle.

• Workers harvested coffee beans across the steep hillside plantation.

• Conservationists argued that a commercial plantation supports far less wildlife than ancient forest.

Where does plantation come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin plantatio, meaning 'a planting' or 'the act of setting plants in the ground', which was built on the verb plantare, 'to plant', and ultimately on planta, the word for a sprout, shoot, or cutting. English took it up through Old French in the late 1300s, at first with the literal sense of placing young plants or seeds into soil. By the 1500s it had broadened to mean a settlement or colony, since settlers were thought of as being 'planted' in new territory, and this is the sense behind the early English colonial plantations in Ireland and the Americas. From there it narrowed again to mean a large agricultural estate growing a single crop such as sugar, cotton, or tobacco, often worked by enslaved or indentured labour. The spelling stays close to its Latin root: the plain word 'plant' sits at the front, with the smooth -ation ending that English added to countless borrowed verbs.

How the word is built

• plant (from Latin planta: a sprout or cutting)
• -ation (noun suffix denoting an action or its result)