neighbourhood
Pluralneighbourhoods
US spellingneighborhood
- 1An area of a town or city, especially the streets around someone's home or around a particular place, often with a character of its own.
Is there a good chemist anywhere in your neighbourhood?
Most of the families in our neighbourhood send their children to the same primary school.
UsagePeople live in a neighbourhood and walk around it: the shops in our neighbourhood.
Similararea, district, locality, vicinity
Note
Its edges can be loose, the handful of streets someone thinks of as home, or formal, an official division of a town, city or region.
- 2The people living in a particular residential area, considered together.
News of the robbery shocked the entire neighbourhood.
By morning, half the neighbourhood had signed the petition against the new road.
UsageOften with the whole, the entire or half the: the whole neighbourhood came out.
Similarcommunity
Note
Here the area stands for the people in it, as the street or the village can: the fire alarmed the neighbourhood means the residents, not the houses.
- 3Closeness in space; the fact of being near something.
Residents living in the immediate neighbourhood of the airport have been offered help with the cost of double glazing.
Several rare orchids have been found in the neighbourhood of the old quarry, which is now a nature reserve.
UsageUsually as in the neighbourhood of a place, often with immediate before it.
Similarproximity, nearness, closeness
Oppositedistance, remoteness
Note
Buildings and places can share it as readily as people: slums and a palace may stand in awful neighbourhood. Unlike the relationship of neighbours, nothing social is implied: it is a matter of distance alone.
Less common meanings
- 4A rough figure close to a stated number, used mainly in the phrase in the neighbourhood of.
Repairs to the roof are likely to cost in the neighbourhood of £20,000.
Temperatures this weekend should be somewhere in the neighbourhood of 30 degrees.
UsageUsed in in the neighbourhood of + a number, often after somewhere; in the region of means the same.
Note
The language of place borrowed for numbers: a sum is pictured as an area around the stated figure.
- 5The relationship of being neighbours, living near or next to one another.
Then the prison and the palace were in awful neighbourhood.
1835, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, RienziNor content with such / Audacious neighbourhood, the wisest heart / Of Solomon he led by fraud to build / His Temple right against the Temple of God.
1667, John Milton, Paradise LostNote
A tie ranked beside brotherhood in older English: George Peele's The Old Wives' Tale (1595) asks for help for neighbourhood or brotherhood, and in Shakespeare's Henry V a royal marriage is meant to plant neighbourhood between France and England. The sense is chiefly obsolete, so a modern reader will take the word as a place unless the context is plainly about a bond.
Checked 5 Nov 2026 · 3 facts
- George Peele wrote The Old Wives' Tale, first printed in 1595. en.wikipedia.org
- The play places neighbourhood beside brotherhood as grounds for helping someone; Lampriscus makes the request. gutenberg.org
- In Shakespeare's Henry V, the French king hopes the royal marriage will establish neighbourhood between France and England. shakespeare.mit.edu
- 6The kindly, helpful spirit expected of a good neighbour.
Note
Where the bond between neighbours is the plain fact of living close, this is the conduct that ought to go with it: the goodwill that befits a good neighbour. The sense is obsolete, and neighbourliness is the word that now does its work, alongside plain goodwill or kindness.
Checked 5 Nov 2026 · 2 facts
- The contrasted sense denotes living close to one another. en.wiktionary.org
- The sense denoting the goodwill befitting a good neighbour is obsolete. en.wiktionary.org
- 7In mathematics, a set that contains a given point together with every point close enough to it, such as an open set or open ball around the point.
- 8In graph theory, the set of vertices joined to a particular vertex by an edge.
- 9In cellular automata, the group of cells around a given cell whose states fix that cell's state in the next generation.
Practice
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Origin
Formed from neighbour + -hood.
Checked 5 Nov 2026 · 1 fact
- Neighbourhood is formed from neighbour and -hood. en.wiktionary.org