neighborly
Americanadjective
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of neighborly
Explanation
When you're neighborly, you are friendly and helpful to the people who live in your neighborhood or building. A neighborly (and backbreaking) gesture might be shoveling the snow on your neighbor's driveway. It's neighborly to say hello to people who live nearby, and it's also neighborly to organize a block party and invite everyone on your street. It's less neighborly to leave your barking dog tied up all night right outside your neighbors' bedroom window, or to have loud parties without inviting your downstairs neighbor. Neighborlike was once more commonly used than neighborly, and both come from Old English roots, neah, "near," and gebur, "dweller."
Vocabulary lists containing neighborly
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.
That’s something maybe the mayor would have to put as a moral question to the city, asking New Yorkers to do the neighborly thing: keeping all of our sidewalks and communities clean for everyone else.
From Slate • Feb. 24, 2026
We aren’t that many years removed from the neighborly “Be Kind, Rewind” stickers on rented videocassettes.
From The Wall Street Journal • Feb. 23, 2026
I love both of these examples because they point to a particular strain of hospitality — the set it and forget it invite — that works especially well for building neighborly connections.
From Salon • Jan. 27, 2026
Hackman and his wife, Betsy Arakawa, were described as private but neighborly by those who got to know them over many years.
From Los Angeles Times • Mar. 7, 2025
But now, just to establish himself, he would double past the second baseman, who was playing too neighborly to a second base that was way too close to third.
From "Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy" by Gary D. Schmidt
Definitions 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.
