By Anatoly Liberman
Habit, in additions to the meaning that is universally known (“settled disposition of mind and body”), can also designate “apparel,” even though in restricted contexts, such as monk’s habit or riding habit. At first sight, these senses do not belong together, and yet they do. The word is, of course, a “loan” from French. (I have mentioned more than once that linguistic loans are permanent, for they are never returned, except when, for example, an ancient Germanic, that is, Franconian word traveled to Old French—note the similarity of Franconian and French—and then returned to English or more rarely to German so changed that even philologists sometimes have trouble recognizing the prodigal son.) Both Latin habitus and its continuation Old French habit already combined the two meanings retained in English; English only borrowed both.
Since habitus was the past participle of habere “to have,” it could refer to almost anything that was “had,” including dress and mental makeup. Less predictable is the meaning of Latin habitare “to have in permanent possession, keep,” whence “to stay put; dwell,” from which English has, again via French, inhabit and habitat. Habitare is the frequentative form of habere. A frequentative verb describes a regularly occurring action: for example, we can wrest an object from an opponent’s grip and wrestle continually with a problem: wrestle is frequentative, as opposed to wrest. Habitat is a curious bookish word that surfaced in English only in the 18th century. Those who know some Latin will immediately see that habitat is the 3rd person singular of habitare, that is, “he dwells.” Here I cannot do better that quote The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology: “…derived from its use in [Latin descriptions of] floras and faunas to introduce the natural place of growth or occurrence of a species (e.g. ‘Common Primrose. Habitat in sylvis’ [grows in woods].” Thus, a Latin verb was transformed into an English noun. Inhabit goes back to Latin inhabitare, literally “indwell.”
Some other derivatives and borrowings with the same root, such as the legal term habendum, the phrase habeas corpus (both pure Latin), habitual, habituate, and habitué, hardly deserve our attention. But it is worthy of mention that French, like Spanish and Italian, lost initial h quite early in its history. When we see Spanish hay or Italian ho, we know that h is a graphic symbol devoid of phonetic value. French borrowings have taught us to treat h- with caution. Engl. hour, ultimately from Latin hora, is a homonym of our (the Spanish cognate is still spelled hora, like French heure, but the Italian for hour is ora!). Engl. habit is the product of medieval and Renaissance scholarship: the learned, who took themselves too seriously, loved to spell English words etymologically and sometimes suggested such silly variants as abhominable because they derived the adjective from ab and hominem, while in fact it is related to omen. Later the written image of habit, humble, and so forth affected the way they were pronounced. Fluctuations are still possible. Herb is herb in England but ‘erb in American English, in which Herb is only a name,