neighbor. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000.

The American Heritage^® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000.

neighbor

SYLLABICATION:	neigh·bor
PRONUNCIATION:	nbr
NOUN:	1. One who lives near or next to another. 2. A person, place, or thing adjacent to or located near another. 3. A fellow human. 4. Used as a form of familiar address.
VERB:	Inflected forms: neigh·bored, neigh·bor·ing, neigh·bors
TRANSITIVE VERB:	To lie close to or border directly on.
INTRANSITIVE VERB:	To live or be situated close by.
ADJECTIVE:	Situated or living near another: a neighbor state.
ETYMOLOGY:	Middle English neighebor, from Old English nahgebr : nah, near + gebr, dweller; see bheu- in Appendix I.
WORD HISTORY:	Loving one's neighbor as oneself would be much easier, or perhaps much more difficult, if the word neighbor had kept to its etymological meaning. The source of our word, the assumed West Germanic form nhgabr, was a compound of the words nhwiz, “near,” and bram, “dweller, especially a farmer.” A neighbor, then, was a near dweller. Nahgebr,* the Old English descendant of this West Germanic word, and its descendant in Middle English, neighebor, and our Modern English neighbor have all retained the literal notion, even though one can now have many neighbors whom one does not know, a situation that would have been highly unlikely in earlier times. The extension of this word to mean “fellow” is probably attributable to the Christian concern with the treatment of one's fellow humans, as in the passage in Matthew 19:19 that urges love of one's neighbor.


The American Heritage^® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by the Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.