Prairie
nounA large area of flat or rolling grassland with few or no trees, especially in central North America.
How to spell prairie
7 letters · 2 syllables
How to pronounce prairie
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does prairie mean?
- nounA large area of flat or rolling grassland with few or no trees, especially in central North America.
Prairie in a sentence
-
The wagon train crossed miles of open prairie before reaching the river.
-
Early settlers built their homes from blocks of prairie sod.
Where does prairie come from?
Language of origin: French
This word came into English directly from French, where prairie simply meant 'meadow' or 'grassland'. The French form developed from the Latin pratum, meaning 'meadow' or 'open grassy ground', through a Vulgar Latin diminutive prataria. English borrowed the French spelling more or less intact in the eighteenth century, and the term took firm root in North America, where settlers and explorers used it for the vast, treeless grasslands of the interior. Because the spelling was kept exactly as in French, the doubled vowel cluster 'ai' followed by the soft 'rie' ending is the trap: writers reach for an English-looking pattern rather than the French one. The same Latin pratum survives in the rarer English word 'pratal', meaning 'of meadows', and helps explain why the heart of the word is 'prai-' and not 'prar-'.
How the word is built
- prair- (from French prairie: meadow, from Latin pratum 'meadow')
- -ie (French noun ending)
Fix your spelling for good.
Spelling Garden finds the words you personally get wrong, plants them in a garden, and brings each one back just before you would have forgotten it.
Just five minutes a day is all it takes to fix your spelling.