Population

How to spell population

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce population

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does population mean?

1. nounThe total number of people living in a particular area or place.
2. nounThe complete set of items or individuals from which a sample is drawn in a study.

Population in a sentence

• The city's population has grown steadily over the past decade.

• The researchers drew a random sample from the whole population.

• Rural areas often have a smaller population than urban centres.

• The survey could not reach every member of the target population.

Where does population come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin populus, meaning 'people' or 'a nation', the same root that gives us 'public', 'popular', and 'populace'. The late Latin verb populare came to mean 'to fill with people', and from it grew the noun populatio, describing the act of peopling a place. English adopted the word in the early 1600s, borrowing it directly from this Latin source, originally to describe the act of populating an area before it settled into its modern meaning: the total number of inhabitants of a place. The single 'l' followed by '-ation' is the usual spelling stumble, since speakers sometimes expect a doubled letter; remembering the family link to 'popular' helps fix the single 'p-o-p-u-l' core. Statisticians later broadened the sense to mean any complete set of items under study, a usage that remains central in science and surveys today.

How the word is built

• popul- (from populus: people)
• -ation (noun suffix denoting a state or result)