inhabitant

Pluralinhabitants

1. 1
   nouncountable

   A person, animal, or thing that lives in or occupies a particular place.

   Each inhabitant of the town received a notice about the road closure.

   The forest's inhabitants include deer, foxes, and countless nesting birds.

   Similarresident, dweller

   Oppositevisitor

   Note

   Behind the word is a Latin present participle, inhabitāns, "dwelling in." It is built from in- and habitō, a frequentative of habeō, "to hold," so an inhabitant is, at root, one who keeps holding a place. It tends to come in the plural with of: the inhabitants of a small coastal town, of Taiwan, even of Mars, though Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899) puts them in the planet instead.

2. 2
   adjective

   Living in or occupying a particular place; resident.

   The inhabitant communities along the river depend on the seasonal floods.

   Researchers cataloged the inhabitant species found only on that island.

   Similarresident, local, native

   Note

   The adjective has its own pedigree. Middle English already had inhabitaunt as an adjective alongside the plural noun inhabitantes, both from the Latin participle behind the noun. It is not comparable: a community either is inhabitant or is not, and nothing is ever more inhabitant than something else.

3. 3
   nouncountable

   A value that has, or belongs to, a given type.

   Each inhabitant of a type can be built using that type's construction rules.

   A type with exactly two inhabitants behaves much like a simple on-off flag.

   Similarvalue, element

   Note

   Type theory borrows the everyday picture of someone living in a place: a type is a place, and its values are what live there. Counting a type's inhabitants gives its cardinality, which is how Programming in Scala (2021) links types to arithmetic. A type with at least one inhabitant is called inhabited, and one with none is empty. Where types are read as propositions, producing an inhabitant amounts to proving one.

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