neighbour

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English

Alternative forms

Etymology

From Middle English neyghebour, neighebor, neighbour, neihebur, from Old English nēahġebūr (“neighbour”), from Proto-Germanic *nēhwagabūrô (“neighbour”), equivalent to nigh +‎ bower. Cognate with Scots nichbour (“neighbour”), Saterland Frisian Noaber (“neighbour”), Dutch nabuur (“neighbour”), German Low German Navur (“neighbour”), German Nachbar (“neighbour”), Danish nabo (“neighbour”), Norwegian nabo (“neighbour”), Icelandic nábúi (“neighbour”). More at nigh, bower (“farmer”).

Pronunciation

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    • Audio (UK):(file)
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  • Rhymes: -eɪbə(ɹ)
  • Hyphenation: neigh‧bour

Noun

neighbour (plural neighbours) (British spelling)

  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 two noisy cats.
    They′re our neighbours across the street.
    • 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. One who is near in sympathy or confidence.
  3. (biblical) A fellow human being.
    • 1982, Bible (NKJV), Leviticus 19:18,
      You shall not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the children of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.

Synonyms

Antonyms

Derived terms

terms derived from neighbor (noun)

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Translations

Verb

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

  1. (transitive) To be adjacent to
    Though France neighbours Germany, its culture is significantly different.
    • 1615, George Sandys, “(please specify the page)”, in The Relation of a Iourney Begun An: Dom: 1610. […], London: […] [Richard Field] for W. Barrett, →OCLC:
      leisurely ascending hills that neighbour the shore
  2. (intransitive, followed by "on"; figurative) To be similar to, to be almost the same as.
    That sort of talk is neighbouring on treason.
  3. To associate intimately with; to be close to.
    • c. 1605–1606, William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act 1, Scene 1:
      The barbarous Scythian, / […] shall to my bosom / Be as well neighboured, pitied, and relieved / As thou my sometime daughter.

Usage notes

  • The verb meaning "to be adjacent to" is most frequently encountered in its participle form: neighbouring.

Translations

Middle English

Noun

neighbour

  1. Alternative form of neyghebour
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