habitat

The story

1. Latin · borrowed fromhabitat“it dwells, lives”
2. English todayhabitat

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.