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vicinity

UK/vɪˈsɪnɪti/US/vəˈsɪnəti/
nounB2Common in everyday speech and writing · #4,823 of 15,258leans writtenformal · an editor’s judgement

Other forms: vicinities

The vicinity is the area immediately around a place. Just here, and a short way in every direction.

The word is formal and it belongs to police statements, property descriptions and reports: in the vicinity of the station, anyone in the vicinity at the time. Everyday speech says nearby or round here. There is a second use with numbers, since in the vicinity of a figure means approximately that much. The adjective vicinal is almost never used, and near and nearby carry the everyday work.

Definitions of vicinity

  1. 1nounvicinityThe area near or surrounding a place.B2

    “Several witnesses were in the vicinity at the time.”

Where it comes from

The vicinity is the village. Latin vīcus meant a village, vīcīnus the person next door, and vīcīnitās the neighbourhood the two of them made between them.

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *weyḱ-

  2. Latin

    vīcīnitās — neighborhood

  3. English, today

    vicinity

Built from

  • vīcīnus · Latin — neighbor
  • vīcus · Latin — village

From vicine + ity, from Latin vīcīnitās (“neighborhood”) (compare French vicinité), from vīcīnus (“neighbor”) (compare French voisin), from vīcus (“village”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Man Called Ove

First appears in chapter 10 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

vicinity in the wild

  • The temple's vicinity has rare plant and animal species.

    Bhimashankar Temple

  • As the vicinity cards have to operate at a greater distance, the necessary magnetic field is less than that for a proximity card (1.5 to 7.5 A/m).

    ISO/IEC 15693

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.