habitancy

[hab-i-tn-see]

noun

plural

habitancies 

1. the act or fact of inhabiting; inhabitancy.

2. the total number of inhabitants; population.

Word History and Origins

Origin of habitancy¹

First recorded in 1785–95; habit(ant) ¹ + -ancy

Example Sentences

Allyce Wood's "Habitancy" uses string to create human and canine shadow figures on the walls of a vacant room, while Ryan Molenkamp's "Strain" seemingly internalizes the rolling/spiky shapes of Seattle's hills and broadcast towers in a conventional black-and-white painting, only to have them escape the painting's bounds and become 3-D structures wrapping their way around both the inside and outside of the house.

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The cotton counties, which are the counties of densest coloured habitancy, exemplify this fact with great clearness.

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They then caught their horses and moved their families to the West Fork; and when they visited the places of their former habitancy for the purpose of collecting their stock and carrying it off with their other property, scarce a vestige of them was to be seen,––the Indians had been there after they left the cave, and burned the houses, pillaged their movable property, and destroyed the cattle and hogs.

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The Creator has not altogether effaced his own image in any region of human habitancy.

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The little villages, so unlike our own, and yet so admirably fitted for peasant comfort, the homesteads embedded in plantations of willows, the neatness of every thing round the farm-houses, and even the sleekness of the cattle, which seemed by their tameness to form a part of the habitancy—all were objects of constant remark on our march; and we could easily comprehend the horror with which the arrival of a French commissariat must strike these comfortable burghers.

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