habitat

Meaning

Noun

• Conditions suitable for an organism or population of organisms to live.
• A place or type of site where an organism or population naturally occurs.
• A terrestrial or aquatic area distinguished by geographic, abiotic and biotic features, whether entirely natural or semi-natural.
• A place in which a person lives.

Origin

• From Latin habitat ("it dwells, lives"), the 3rd person singular present active indicative form of habitō. In Linnaeus and similar authors, the geographical ranges of species were customarily denoted in Latin by a sentence beginning with "Habitat", e.g. "Habitat in Europa" ("It lives in Europe"), and it thus became the convention to refer to the geographical range as the "habitat". Compare the English derivations of exit and ignoramus from Latin finite verbs reanalyzed as English nouns.