Village
nounA small community of houses in a rural area, larger than a hamlet but smaller than a town.
How to spell village
7 letters · 2 syllables
How to pronounce village
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does village mean?
- nounA small community of houses in a rural area, larger than a hamlet but smaller than a town.
Village in a sentence
-
The village had a single shop and a stone church.
-
They moved to a quiet village after years in the city.
Where does village come from?
Language of origin: French
The word traces back to the Latin villa, which meant a country house or farm estate. From villa, Latin formed villaticus, describing things belonging to a farm, and this gave rise to a word for the cluster of dwellings that grew up around such an estate. Old French turned this into village, meaning a group of houses in the countryside, and English borrowed the term in the 1300s. The original sense of a farming settlement explains the spelling: the double 'll' and the soft 'g' of the French -age ending have stayed intact ever since. The same villa root survives in modern English words like 'villa' itself and 'villain', which once simply meant a farm worker tied to an estate.
How the word is built
- vill- (from Latin villa: country house, farm estate)
- -age (noun suffix denoting a place or collective)
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.