Habituals

Part of speech: adjective

Definitions

1. Regularly occurring behaviors or practices that have become routine over time
2. Describing actions or tendencies that are performed consistently and often without conscious thought
3. Characterizing patterns of behavior that are firmly established and repeated consistently over a duration

Etymology: "Habituals" is the plural of "habitual," an adjective that came into English in the late Middle Ages from Medieval Latin "habituālis," meaning "customary." The Latin word it grew from, "habitus," covered a surprisingly wide range: a person's character or disposition, a bodily or emotional condition, and even clothing or dress. That last sense survives in the modern word "habit" for a monastic robe, which shows how the same Latin root could describe both what someone wore and what someone was like. The root is "habeō," meaning "to have, hold, or possess," and "habitus" is built from it with the suffix "-tus," which forms nouns from verbs. The English adjective is a simple build on this: "habit" plus the suffix "-ual," which marks a relationship to the noun. So a habitual action is one that belongs to a person's settled way of being, rather than one they consciously choose each time.

Synonyms: customary, regular, recurrent, frequent, usual

Antonyms: irregular, uncommon, occasional, rare, sporadic