Plaza

How to spell plaza

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce plaza

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does plaza mean?

1. nounAn open public square or paved area in a town or city, often surrounded by buildings or shops.

Plaza in a sentence

• The town hall faces a wide cobbled plaza where the market is held.

• Shoppers gathered in the plaza outside the new department store.

Where does plaza come from?

Language of origin: Spanish

This word came into English directly from Spanish in the early 1800s, where plaza means a public square or open marketplace at the heart of a town. Spanish inherited it from the Latin platea, which meant a broad street or open courtyard, and Latin in turn borrowed it from the Greek plateia (hodos), literally a 'broad way'. The underlying Greek adjective platys simply meant 'broad' or 'flat', the same root that gives us 'plate' and 'platypus' (the 'flat-footed' animal). Strikingly, plaza is a direct cousin of the ordinary English word 'place' and the Italian 'piazza', all three descending from that single Latin platea, which explains why a plaza is essentially a 'place' in its oldest civic sense. The single z and the unstressed final a are simply the Spanish spelling carried over intact, which is the main thing to remember.

How the word is built

• plaza (Spanish for an open public square, from Latin platea: broad street)