Territory

How to spell territory

9 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce territory

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does territory mean?

1. nounAn area of land under the control of a ruler, state, or organisation, or claimed by an animal or person.

Territory in a sentence

• The company expanded its sales territory to cover three new cities.

• The disputed territory along the border has caused tension for decades.

Where does territory come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin territorium, which described the area of land surrounding and belonging to a town. That noun was built on terra, meaning simply 'earth' or 'land', the same root that gives us 'terrain', 'terrace' and 'terrestrial'. Roman writers themselves were unsure of the formation: some linked it to terrere, 'to frighten', imagining a territorium as the district from which intruders were warned off, though most scholars treat this as a later folk explanation rather than the true origin. English borrowed the word in the late 1400s, at first for a stretch of land under a ruler's control, and the political sense (a region governed by a state, or one not yet a full province) grew alongside it. The double 'r' and the unstressed middle vowel are the spelling traps, both inherited straight from the Latin terr- root.

How the word is built

• territor- (from Latin territorium, the land round a town, ultimately terra: earth, land)
• -y (noun ending)