location
Plurallocations
- 1A specific spot or place in the physical world, such as where something stands or happens.
The location of the new hospital, just off the highway, makes it easy for ambulances from three towns to reach.
The bakery's new location is just two blocks from the train station.
UsageUsually the location of something, and things happen at a location: at its new location.
Similarplace, site, position, spot, setting
Note
The everyday sense, though the word's shape points elsewhere. English borrowed the noun from Latin, and it lines up with locate plus -ion, a suffix that names an act, as the act of locating still does. This sense names the result instead: the spot where something has been placed or found.
- 2A real site outside the studio where a film or television crew shoots scenes, as when a movie is made on location.
The cast spent three weeks shooting on location in the Moroccan desert.
Producers scouted several locations before choosing an old farmhouse for the pilot episode.
UsageNo article in on location: filmed on location in New York; otherwise a location, scout locations.
- 3An act of locating; the fixing or finding of a position.
Radar made the location of enemy ships far easier.
Accurate location of the fault line depends on a dense network of sensors.
Note
Here the word names the doing rather than the spot, and it usually takes an of-phrase for what is found or fixed. Joseph Church Helm, in his 1886 opinion in Pelican & Dives Min. Co. v. Snodgrass, writes of "completing the statutory location of a mining claim." That legal phrasing treats locating as a task that can be left unfinished, and it shades into the US land-law meaning.
Checked 5 Nov 2026 · 2 facts
- Joseph Church Helm wrote the cited opinion in Pelican & Dives Min. Co. v. Snodgrass in 1886. en.wiktionary.org
- The opinion contains the exact quoted wording. en.wiktionary.org
Less common meanings
- 4In South Africa, a racially segregated urban area reserved for non-white residents, from the late 19th century until the end of apartheid; a township.
Brutus wrote of the sounds of apartheid, of the townships and the locations.
The location lay across the railway from the white suburbs, out of sight and out of mind.
Similartownship
Note
In South Africa the word names the segregated urban areas where non-white people were made to live, and it carries that history with it. Dennis Brutus pairs it with its near-synonym in "the townships, the locations." Read it with apartheid in view: in this sense it is not a neutral word for a place but the name of a segregated settlement, a long way from the ordinary "place" meaning.
- 5In US law, the marking out of the boundaries of a piece of land, or the identifying of its site, according to the description in an entry, plan, or map.
- 6In law, the letting of a thing, or of a person's services, for rent or hire.
- 7In Kenya, an administrative region below counties and subcounties, itself divided into sublocations.
Practice
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Origin
Latin locus ("a place") gave locare ("to place, put, set") and then locatio, locationis ("a placing"), which English borrowed; it amounts to locate plus the suffix -ion.