habitat
n. C / Un. the natural home or environment where an animal, plant, or other living thing lives. It provides everything the organism needs to survive, like food and shelter.
n. the natural environment in which a particular species of organism lives and thrives. Characterised by physical features and biological factors that support the life cycle of the inhabitant.
The forest is the natural habitat of the brown bear.
Urban expansion often destroys the natural habitat of local wildlife, forcing animals to move closer to human settlements.
Conservationists are working to restore the coastal habitat, as the loss of native mangroves has left the shoreline vulnerable to erosion and displaced several endangered bird species.
From Latin habitat (“it dwells, lives”), the 3rd person singular present active indicative form of habitō (“I 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.
Often used with the preposition 'for' or 'of'. When used as 'both', it is uncountable in a general sense and countable when referring to specific types of environments.