extent

ik-STENT/ɪkˈstɛnt/

Pluralextents (some meanings)

6 meanings of extent

1
noununcountable
The space, area, volume, or point that something reaches or extends to.
Surveyors mapped the full extent of the flooded region.
The extent of the glacier has shrunk over the past century.
Similararea, size, expanse, reach
Note
Old French estente meant both a stretch of land and its valuation, and English kept both: this sense of reach and the valuation of property. Spenser's dragon lies "stretcht on the ground in monstrous large extent" in The Faerie Queene (1590), the physical sense at full size. The word moves easily into the abstract, too: the extent of someone's knowledge, or "to the fullest extent of" something, where the phrase marks a limit as much as a size.
2
noununcountable
A range of values or locations covered by something.
The report described the extent of incomes across the city.
Researchers measured the extent of the species' habitat across several states.
Similarrange, scope, spread, span
3
nouncountable
A contiguous area of storage allocated as a single unit within a file system.
The database allocated a new extent each time the table grew.
Defragmentation tools try to merge a file's scattered extents into fewer regions.
Note
A file system's unit of bookkeeping. Instead of tracking every cluster, the system describes each extent with two numbers: the first cluster and how many clusters follow. Richard E. Smith's Elementary Information Security (2019) lays it out this way. A file held in one extent sits in a single unbroken run. A fragmented file has many, which is why tidying a disk is described as merging a file's extents.
4
nouncountable
The official valuation placed on a piece of property.
The officials completed an extent of the property before the debt was settled.
A detailed extent of the lands accompanied the inheritance papers.
Similarvaluation, appraisal, assessment
5
nouncountable
A writ directing the sheriff to seize a debtor's property in order to recover debts owed to the Crown.
The court granted an extent to seize the debtor's estate.
Under the extent, the sheriff took possession of the goods owed to the Crown.
Note
A writ that served the Crown as creditor. It reached only debts of record owed to the Crown, and the sheriff was the officer who carried it out. Shakespeare's As You Like It (c. 1598–1600) shows the idiom: officers "make an extent upon his house and lands," with upon marking the property seized. The writ shares its name with the valuation of property.

Less common meaning

6
adjectiveobsolete
Extended; stretched out over an area or distance.
But both his Hands, most filthy feculent, Above the Water were on high extent,
1590, Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene
Note
An obsolete adjective that keeps the shape of Latin extentus, from extendere, 'to stretch out'. Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1590) shows a figure whose filthy hands 'Above the Water were on high extent': held up and stretched out. Read such lines with care. The phrase looks like the noun, but it means 'extended'. In modern writing, use extended or outstretched instead.

Practice

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Origin

It comes from Middle English "extente," via Anglo-Norman "extente" and Old French "estente" ("valuation of land, stretch of land"), from "estendre/extendre" ("extend") or from Latin "extentus," ultimately from Latin "extendere" ("to extend").