Hamlets

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Small rural communities or clusters of houses, often lacking their own church or governing body, or brief references to the famous Shakespearean prince
2. Minor settlements smaller than villages, frequently without churches or local governments, or mentions of the tragic literary character created by Shakespeare
3. Tiny populated rural areas with few services and no independent administration, or allusions to a notable figure from a classic tragedy

Etymology: "Hamlets" is the plural of "hamlet", and the word's core meaning is a small home. In Middle English, "ham" meant "home" or "village", and the diminutive ending "-let", meaning "small", was added to it. The result was a settlement smaller than a village, which is exactly the sense the word still carries today. The "ham" in "hamlet" is the same root that gives English "home". It goes back through Proto-Germanic "haimaz" to Frankish "haim", which passed into Old French as "ham". French then formed a double diminutive, "hamel" and then "hamelet", and English borrowed the result as Middle English "hamlet". Because the word originally described a small home, it did not come to mean a place without a church or local government in the way a parish or town might; those features simply tended to be absent from places that small.

Synonyms: villages, settlements