contiguous

Etymology

It is borrowed from Latin contiguus (“touching, bordering upon, near”) with the English suffix -ous,^[2][3][4][5] perhaps under the influence of French contigu.^[4] The Latin adjective comes from contingō (“to touch upon, be in contact”),^[3][5][6][7] which is made up of con- (“together”) and tangō (“to touch”), whose root has a changed vowel in compounds.^[4][8][9] English had earlier forms, now obsolete: contiguate from the mid-15th century, and contigue from the 1540s.^[3]

Earliest recorded meaning

Touching, in contact, meeting at a common boundary: 1611, in Thomas Coryate's Crudities.^[2][4] Etymonline dates it to the 1610s, Merriam-Webster to about 1609 and Dictionary.com to 1605–15.^[3][5][8] The Shorter Oxford and the Oxford Dictionary of English put it in the early 16th century, with the looser sense "neighbouring" first.^[10][6]

Semantic evolution

From touching in space the word was extended to things next to each other in time or order (1622) and, in mathematics, to adjacent angles (1728).^[2] From 1710 it was also used loosely of things near each other though not in contact, and formerly also of people living nearby.^[2] Johnson (1755) defined it as meeting so as to touch, bordering on each other, and not separate, quoting Bacon.^[11] In American use the contiguous United States are the states other than Alaska and Hawaii.^[5]

Timeline

• 1611 – touching, adjoining, meeting at a boundary.^[2][4]
• 1622 – next in time or order.^[2]
• 1710 – loosely, neighbouring, near though not touching.^[2]
• 1728 – in mathematics, of adjacent angles.^[2]
• 1770 – of ideas or experiences, coming together in the mind.^[2]

Meanings

Adjective

1. Touching along a side or boundary; sharing a border: The two farms are contiguous along the river.^[7][5][2]
2. Next to each other, with nothing of the same kind in between; adjacent.^[5][7]
3. Coming next in time or order; consecutive.^[7][2]
4. (mathematics) Of angles, adjacent.^[2]

Word family

• contiguously
• contiguousness
• noncontiguous
• subcontiguous
• uncontiguous

Related words

• contiguity
• contact
• contingent
• contagion
• tangent
• continuous

References

1. ^ Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l Oxford English Dictionary Online (accessed March 2026), Oxford: Oxford University Press
3. ^ a b c d Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
4. ^ a b c d e Barnhart, Robert K. (1988), The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology
5. ^ a b c d e f Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary (2024), online ed., Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster
6. ^ a b Stevenson, Angus, ed. (2010), Oxford Dictionary of English, 3rd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
7. ^ a b c d Collins English Dictionary (2023), Glasgow: HarperCollins
8. ^ a b Dictionary.com Unabridged (2016), based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, New York: Random House
9. ^ Klein, Ernest. A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1966–1967.
10. ^ Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (2002), 5th ed., ed. William R. Trumble and Angus Stevenson, Oxford: Oxford University Press
11. ^ Johnson, Samuel (1755), A Dictionary of the English Language, London; 4th ed. 1773; Johnson's Dictionary Online, ed. Beth Rapp Young et al.