Vicinity

How to spell vicinity

8 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce vicinity

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does vicinity mean?

1. nounThe area near or surrounding a particular place; nearness in space.

Vicinity in a sentence

• Several good restaurants are in the immediate vicinity of the hotel.

• Police searched the vicinity of the station for the missing bag.

Where does vicinity come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin vicinitas, meaning 'neighbourhood' or 'nearness', which was built on the adjective vicinus, 'neighbouring' or 'near'. That adjective in turn came from vicus, a Latin noun for a village, a row of houses, or a cluster of dwellings, so the underlying image is literally of people living close together. English took the word in during the 1500s, at first to mean a neighbourhood or surrounding district, and the looser sense of 'nearness' or 'the area around something' followed. The old vicus root still survives quietly in place names and in the word 'vicinage', a rarer legal term for a neighbourhood. For spelling, it helps to remember the single c and the run of i sounds: vi-cin-ity, all built on that 'near' root vicin.

How the word is built

• vicin- (from Latin vicinus: neighbouring)
• -ity (noun-forming suffix)