Other forms: habitats
A habitat is the kind of place an animal or plant naturally lives in. Rock pools for crabs, hollow trees for owls, the reed beds a heron needs, sea ice under a polar bear.
A habitat is a type of place rather than one address — a hedgerow is a habitat, and so is a coral reef, and so is a rotting log. The phrases you meet most are natural habitat, habitat loss and habitat destruction, all over nature documentaries and conservation reports. Keep it apart from ecosystem, which is everything living in a place plus the place itself, and from environment, which is the whole surroundings. People also use it as a joke about each other: in his natural habitat, meaning the pub or the workshop. The related words are inhabit, inhabitant and uninhabited.
1nounhabitatThe kind of natural place where a particular animal or plant normally lives.
“Draining the marsh destroyed the habitat of half the birds on the list.”
2nounbuiltA built structure designed to keep people alive in a hostile place.
“The crew spent six months in a sealed habitat on the ice.”
habitat is a kind of living place.
Habitat is a whole Latin sentence squeezed into a noun. It means "it dwells, it lives", the third-person form of habitō, "to live or dwell". Naturalists writing in Latin described a species with a line beginning Habitat in Europa — "It lives in Europe" — and readers began treating that opening word as the name of the place itself. English pulled the same trick with exit and tenet.
Proto-Indo-European
*gʰeh₁bʰ-
Latin
habitat
English, today
habitat
Built from
Borrowed from Latin habitat. From Latin habitat (“it dwells, lives”), the 3rd person singular present active indicative form of habitō (“to live or dwell”). In Linnaeus and similar authors, the geographical ranges of species were customarily denoted in Latin by a sentence beginning with "Habitat", e.g. "Habitat in Europa" ("It lives in Europe"), and it thus became the convention to refer to the geographical range as the "habitat". Compare the English derivations of exit, floruit, ignoramus, and tenet from Latin finite verbs reanalyzed as English nouns.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA