Other forms: colonies
A colony is a large group of the same creature living together. An ant colony, a colony of seabirds, a bee colony.
In social insects the colony behaves as one unit — no individual decides anything and the group solves problems none of them could — which is why it is studied as a model of distributed intelligence. The political sense is a territory settled and controlled by another country. Note that the Latin means a farm.
1nouncolonyA large group of the same creature living together.
“A colony of penguins lives on the rocky island.”
2nounterritoryA territory settled and controlled by another country.
“India was a British colony until 1947.”
colony is a group, or a territory.
Latin colonia comes from colonus, a farmer, from colere, to cultivate. Culture and cultivate come from the same tilling.
Proto-Indo-European
*kʷel-
Latin
colōnia
Middle English
colane
English, today
colony
Built from
From Middle English colane, from Latin colōnia. From Middle English colane, colonye, from Latin colōnia (“colony”), from colōnus (“farmer; colonist”), from colō (“till, cultivate, worship”), from earlier *quelō, from Proto-Indo-European kʷel- (“to move; to turn (around)”). a doublet of Cologne and Colonia and Köln.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA