colony

pronunciation

How to pronounce colony in British English: UK [ˈkɒləni] word uk audio image

How to pronounce colony in American English: US [ˈkɑːləni] word us audio image

Noun:

a body of people who settle far from home but maintain ties with their homeland; inhabitants remain nationals of their home state but are not literally under the home state's system of government
a group of animals of the same type living together
a geographical area politically controlled by a distant country
(microbiology) a group of organisms grown from a single parent cell

Word Origin

colony: colony: [16] Etymologically, a colony is a ‘settled land’. The word goes back ultimately to the Indo-European base *qwel-, *qwol-, which signified ‘move around’ (it is the source of English cycle and wheel) and hence ‘move habitually in, settle in, inhabit’. One of the descendants of this base was Latin colere ‘inhabit, cultivate’. Thus someone who settled on a new piece of land and cultivated it was a colōnus, and the land he settled was his colōnia. (The German city of Cologne gets its name from Latin colōnia; in Roman times it was called Colōnia Agrippīna, the ‘settlement or colony of Agrippa’.)=> cycle, wheel

colony (n.): late 14c., "ancient Roman settlement outside Italy," from Latin colonia "settled land, farm, landed estate," from colonus "husbandman, tenant farmer, settler in new land," from colere "to inhabit, cultivate, frequent, practice, tend, guard, respect," from PIE root *kwel- (1) "move around" (source of Latin -cola "inhabitant;" see cycle (n.)). Also used by the Romans to translate Greek apoikia "people from home." Modern application dates from 1540s.

2. Colony collapse disorder , as this phenomenon is known , has been getting worse since 2006 .

3. It 's also a component of cockroach alarm pheromones , chemical signals that warn the colony of danger .

4. They thought that there might be a link between how socially integrated a bat colony is and the nature of its tents .