Residency

How to spell residency

9 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce residency

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does residency mean?

1. nounThe fact, status, or period of living in a particular place, especially with legal recognition.
2. nounA period of advanced, supervised clinical training that a doctor undertakes in a hospital after qualifying.

Residency in a sentence

• After three years she applied for permanent residency in the country.

• She completed her residency in paediatrics at a large teaching hospital.

• Proof of residency is required before you can register to vote.

• The residency in surgery lasts several gruelling years before full certification.

Where does residency come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Residency traces back to the Latin verb residere, which meant 'to sit back', 'to remain behind', or 'to settle in a place'. That verb was built from the prefix re-, here suggesting staying put, and sedere, 'to sit', the same root that gives us 'sediment' and 'sedentary'. By the late Middle Ages the idea of remaining or dwelling somewhere had passed through Old French and into English in words like 'reside' and 'resident'. The abstract noun residency grew from this, adding the suffix -ency to name the state or condition of dwelling somewhere; the spelling trap is exactly that ending, since the unstressed middle vowels collapse to a faint schwa and the choice between -ency and -ancy trips many writers. Over time the word also took on the specialised modern sense of a doctor's period of supervised hospital training, where the trainee effectively 'lives in' the post.

How the word is built

• resid- (from Latin residere: to settle, remain)
• -ency (noun suffix denoting state or condition)