inhabitant

What it means

1. Someone or thing who lives in a place.

   I believed it in the same way one of you might believe there are inhabitants in the planet Mars. I knew once a Scotch sailmaker who was certain, dead sure, there were people in Mars.

   1899 February, Joseph Conrad, “The Heart of Darkness”, in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, volume CLXV, number M, New York, N.Y.: The Leonard Scott Publishing Company, […], →OCLC, part I, page 216

   2 more examples

   It was obvious to the inhabitants of the small coastal town of Bridport that in the midst of these squabbles their need for a railway was going to be overlooked, and they decided to take the matter into their own hands.

   1957 November 28, J. Spencer Gilks, “Centenary of the Bridport Branch”, in Railway Magazine, page 747

   About 98 per cent of Taiwan's inhabitants are Han Chinese, a diverse mix of ethnic and linguistic groups, including Hakka, Cantonese and Fujianese, who came from China's southern coast. Taiwan's other two per cent are from one of the nine indigenous tribes, which are scattered throughout the island but largely concentrated along the east coast and in the Central Mountain Range.

   2007 April, Julie Grundvig, “TAIWAN”, in The Asia Book: A Journey Through Every Country in the Continent, →ISBN, →OCLC, page 103, column 2

   Synonyms: resident, dweller

2. type theoryA possible value for a type.

   One way to observe this connection with mathematics is by mapping each type to its cardinality, a count of the inhabitants of that type.

   2021, Martin Odersky et al., chapter 19, in Programming in Scala, 5th edition, Artima, →ISBN

In a sentence

I believed it in the same way one of you might believe there are inhabitants in the planet Mars. I knew once a Scotch sailmaker who was certain, dead sure, there were people in Mars.

1899 February, Joseph Conrad, “The Heart of Darkness”, in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, volume CLXV, number M, New York, N.Y.: The Leonard Scott Publishing Company, […], →OCLC, part I, page 216

Where it comes from

1. Proto-Indo-European*ghabh-“to seize, take, hold, have”
2. Latininhabitāns
3. Old Frenchinhabitant
4. Middle Englishinhabitantes
5. Englishinhabitant

From Middle English inhabitantes (n. plural) and inhabitaunt (adj.), from Old French inhabitant, from Latin inhabitāns, present participle of inhabitō (“to inhabit”), from in- (“in”) + habitō (“to dwell”) (frequentative of habeō (“to hold”), from Proto-Indo-European *ghabh- (“to seize, take, hold, have”). By surface analysis, inhabit + -ant.