inhabitant
Americannoun
-
inhabitants
plural
noun
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of inhabitant
1400–50; late Middle English < Latin inhabitant- (stem of inhabitāns ) dwelling in. See inhabit, -ant
Explanation
Someone who usually lives in a specific place — whether it's a mansion, a cave, or a beach house — is its inhabitant. The old man who lives in the scary house down the street is its inhabitant, and the skunk that built a nest under your porch is — unfortunately — an inhabitant of your front yard. The noun inhabitant comes from the verb inhabit, or "to live in," which in turn is rooted in the Latin word inhabitare, "to dwell in or to live in."
Vocabulary lists containing inhabitant
Unit 4: Powerful Openings
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Geography and World Regions
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The First State of Being
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Saxony-Anhalt had the second highest number of far-right motivated criminal acts per inhabitant last year, according to police statistics.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 8, 2026
The island is also home to other headline names such as Ivanka Trump and Tom Brady, but Bezos is understood to be its richest inhabitant.
From MarketWatch ● Aug. 10, 2026
In this case, a cave filled with the remains of past meals became a shelter for a completely different kind of inhabitant.
From Science Daily ● Apr. 3, 2026
The fluffy inhabitant also helps to entice customers.
From Barron's ● Feb. 10, 2026
The messenger RNA was neither an inhabitant of heaven nor of hell—but a professional go-between.
From "The Gene" by Siddhartha Mukherjee
Crayfish are familiar inhabitants of streams, rivers, and other freshwater environments.
From Science Daily ● Oct. 16, 2026
A BAS team sailed for 15 days to reach the island and study its avian inhabitants, using drones, aerial photography and fitting tracking devices to 20 birds.
From BBC ● Oct. 7, 2026
The setting for Alex Preston’s “A Stranger in Corfu” is the Greek island of Vidos, nicknamed Spyland by its inhabitants, all of whom are retired British intelligence agents.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 16, 2026
City officials deemed nine oceanfront homes unsafe for inhabitants as of Wednesday night, “red-tagging” them — adding two from prior evaluations.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 10, 2026
According to their own tales they were the original inhabitants and were the descendants of the first Men that ever wandered into the West of the middle-world.
From "The Fellowship of the Ring" by J.R.R. Tolkien
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Get a wordDefinitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
