neighbour

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English [edit]

Alternative forms [edit]

Etymology [edit]

From Middle English, from Old English nēahġebūr (“neighbour”), equivalent to nigh +‎ bower. Cognate with Dutch nabuur (“neighbour”), Low German nabur (“neighbour”), German Nachbar (“neighbour”), Norwegian nabo (“neighbour”), Icelandic nábúi (“neighbour”). More at nigh, bower.

Pronunciation [edit]

Noun [edit]

neighbour (plural neighbours) (chiefly UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand)

  1. A person living on adjacent or nearby land; a person situated adjacently or nearby; anything (of the same type of thing as the subject) in an adjacent or nearby position.
    My neighbour has an annoying cat.
    They′re our neighbours across the street.
    My neighbour is very irritable and grumpy at times.
    • 1660, Hugh Peters, The Tales and Jests of Mr. Hugh Peters, reprinted 1807, page 10,
      Being at his own house in the country, when a great tempest of wind rose, he takes an occasion to visit a neighbour by him, and being somewhat merily disposed, quoth he Oh neighbour, did you not see what a wind there was the other day?
    • 1913, Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country, 2010, unnumbered page,
      Undine at length shrank back with an unrecognizing face; but her movement made her opera-glass slip to the floor, and her neighbour bent down and picked it up.
    • 1973, Ernest Buckler, Nova Scotia: Window on the Sea, page 126,
      Neighbours enact their substantive noun when there′s a neighbour′s sickness in the night; as friends do theirs, the cindered and the green times through.
    • 2009, D. Staufer, Classical Percolation, Asok K. Sen, Kamal K. Bardhan, Bikas K. Chakrabarti (editors), Quantum and Semi-Classical Percolation and Breakdown in Disordered Solids, Springer, Lecture Notes in Physics 762, page 4,
      Then a cluster is grown by letting each empty neighbour of an already occupied cluster site decide once and for all, whether it is occupied or empty. One needs to keep and to update a perimeter list of empty neighbours.
    • 2011, Richard Jensen, Chris Cornelis, Fuzzy-Rough Nearest Neighbour Classification, James F. Peters, Andrzej Skowron (editors-in-chief), Transactions on Rough Sets XIII, Springer, Lecture Notes in Computing Science 6499, page 56,
      By contrast to the latter, our method uses the nearest neighbours to construct lower and upper approximations of decision classes, and classifies test instances based on their membership to these approximations.
  2. (biblical) any fellow human being

Synonyms [edit]

Derived terms [edit]

terms derived from neighbor (noun)

Translations [edit]

a person living on adjacent or nearby land
fellow human

Verb [edit]

neighbour (third-person singular simple present neighbours, present participle neighbouring, simple past and past participle neighboured)

  1. (transitive, UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) To be adjacent to (more often used as neighbouring)
    Though France neighbours Germany, its culture is significantly different
  2. (intransitive, UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, followed by "on"; figurative) To approach; to verge on.
    That sort of talk is neighbouring on treason.

Translations [edit]

to be adjacent to
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