habitat
Pluralhabitats
- 1The geographic range or natural area in which a given species normally occurs.
Conservationists mapped the habitat of the endangered frog across three river valleys.
As temperatures rise, many species are shifting their habitats toward the poles.
Note
A word that began as a Latin verb: habitat means "it dwells." Linnaeus and similar authors recorded where a species lived in a Latin sentence that opened with Habitat, and that opening word hardened into an English noun for the range itself. In this sense it is countable, so a species can have several habitats and can shift them.
- 2The surroundings and conditions in which a given kind of organism, or a population of it, is able to live.
The dry desert provides exactly the habitat these cacti require.
Pollution can destroy the habitat that river fish depend on.
Similarenvironment, conditions
Note
Biologists use the word here as a mass noun, with no article and no plural: a park offers amphibian habitat in the same way it offers breeding area. Conservation writing often uses it this way, as in prime habitat, lost habitat, or too little habitat. When the word names one bounded area that can be counted, it becomes the countable ecological area.
- 3A land or water area distinguished by its geographic, non-living, and living features, whether fully natural or partly shaped by people.
The survey identified several distinct habitats along the coastline, from salt marsh to rocky shore.
A managed woodland counts as a semi-natural habitat shaped partly by human use.
Similarenvironment, ecosystem
Note
The ecologist's unit of landscape is something you can count, map and list, from salt marsh to rocky shore. Unlike the set of living conditions, it takes an article and a plural. John and Julia Davenport's The Ecology of Transportation (2006) shows a typical pairing when it calls roadside rights-of-way "a habitat and corridor" for non-native species, an area judged by what it lets live there and pass through.
- 4The dwelling or surroundings in which a person lives.
After decades downtown, the crowded market was his true habitat.
The artist's cluttered studio was the only habitat where she felt fully herself.
Similarelement, environment, domain, home, territory
Note
Here the naturalist's word is carried over to people, and the Latin "it dwells" behind the species-range sense fits a person just as well. Calling a home a habitat casts it as an environment someone inhabits, not just a building. Jessica Houssian, writing in Bazaar in 2006, urges readers to clear the clutter and reorganize their habitat.
Practice
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Origin
From Latin habitat ("it dwells, lives"), the third-person singular of habitō ("I live or dwell"). Writers such as Linnaeus described the range of a species in Latin with a sentence beginning "Habitat," for example "Habitat in Europa" ("It lives in Europe"), and by convention the word came to name the geographical range itself: much like exit, floruit, and tenet, which are Latin verbs reanalyzed as English nouns.