Property

How to spell property

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce property

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does property mean?

1. nounA thing or things owned by someone, especially land or buildings.
2. nounA quality or characteristic that something has.

Property in a sentence

• They bought a small property near the coast last spring.

• The team studied the chemical property of the new alloy.

• The stolen property was returned to its rightful owner.

• Elasticity is a useful property of rubber.

Where does property come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin proprietas, meaning 'a quality belonging to a thing' or 'ownership', which was built on the adjective proprius, literally 'one's own' or 'particular to oneself'. English took it in during the 1300s through Old French proprete, and at first it carried both modern strands at once: the things a person owned and the special qualities that belonged to a thing. Over the centuries the legal sense (land, houses, possessions) and the descriptive sense (a characteristic or attribute, as in 'the properties of water') drifted into the two distinct meanings we use today. The very same proprius root sits inside the everyday words 'proper', 'appropriate' and 'proprietor', which is a useful reminder that property is spelled with the same 'proper' opening. The trap for writers is the unstressed middle: the '-er-' is a faint schwa, so it is easy to drop a letter or write 'propery'.

How the word is built

• proper- (from Latin proprius: one's own)
• -ty (noun suffix forming an abstract or quality noun)