Ornithology

The nineteenth entry is la perte d’habitat, and the second noun is the one word on this page an English reader will not think to look up. « Habitat », in English, belongs to wildlife and to nothing else: a species has one, a person does not, and a sentence about somebody’s habitat is either a joke or a mistake. French kept that sense and added a second one that is far commoner in ordinary print. L’habitat is housing, taken as a whole — the building stock of a country, the way people are lodged. So l’habitat collectif is flats, l’habitat individuel is houses, l’habitat ancien is the older stock, l’amélioration de l’habitat is home improvement, and the national body that pays for it is l’Agence nationale de l’habitat. Nothing in any of those is about animals. Here the ecological sense is the one at work, and the safeguard is the company the word keeps: beside une espèce it is a habitat, beside un logement or une commune it is housing.