Other forms: habits
A habit is something you do so often that you stop thinking about it. A good habit, a bad habit, get into the habit.
The standard phrases are worth learning as units: get into the habit of, be in the habit of, break a habit, kick the habit. It is also the polite word for an addiction — a smoking habit. And a habit is the plain robe worn by monks and nuns, which is the older sense and now the only place the word means clothing. Note habitual, and force of habit, the excuse for doing something without meaning to.
1nounroutineSomething done so often it needs no thought.
“Reading before sleep is a habit rather than a decision.”
2nounhabitA long robe worn by a monk or nun.
“She wore the habit for forty years.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
habit is a settled pattern.
Latin habitus meant condition, bearing or dress, from habere, to have or hold. The clothing sense and the behaviour sense split in medieval French: both are about what a person habitually wears or does, which is why one word covers a nun's robe and a smoking habit.
Proto-Indo-European
*gʰeh₁bʰ-
Latin
habitus — condition, bearing, state, appearance, dress, attire
Middle English
habit
English, today
habit
Built from
From Middle English habit, from Latin habitus (“condition, bearing, state, appearance, dress, attire”), from habeō (“to have, hold, keep”). Distantly related to gift. Replaced Middle English abit, from Old French abit, itself from the same Latin source. Displaced native Old English þēaw, wuna, ġewuna, and sidu.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA