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Consider the following two sentences:

  1. These undocumented locations are inhabited by mysterious creatures.
  2. Climate change is rendering many places around the world inhabitable.

In the first example, inhabited was used to indicate that an creatures live in a location. On the other hand, inhabitable means that living things cannot live in places. How come they have completely opposite meaning when the two words clearly have the same root?

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    Did you check these words in a dictionary? Is there a specific example that you are quoting? Make sure you link to the source, or if that's not possible, then tell us exactly where you read or heard this.
    – James K
    Commented Aug 7, 2023 at 17:49
  • This is an occasional mistake by native speakers, so it is possible that you have read something in which "inhabitable" has been used incorrectly.
    – James K
    Commented Aug 7, 2023 at 17:52
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    Climate change is rendering many places around the world uninhabitable.
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Aug 7, 2023 at 18:03
  • If it were a secondary meaning, a case could be made parallel to the infamous "inflammable", but I agree that I know of no secondary meaning that would make this correct.
    – Luke Sawczak
    Commented Aug 7, 2023 at 18:43

3 Answers 3

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They don’t

If the intended meaning of the second phrase is that no one can live there, then it is written incorrectly. It should have used the word uninhabitable.

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GNU Collaborative International Dictionary of English

  1. Inhabitable (?), a. [L. inhabitabilis. See Inhabit.] Capable of being inhabited; habitable.
  1. Inhabitable, a. [L. inhabitabilis: cf. F. inhabitable. See In- not, and Habitable.] Not habitable; not suitable to be inhabited. [Obs.] [1913 Webster]

Wikitionary

(obsolete) Not habitable; not suitable to be inhabited.

1595 December 9 (first known performance), William Shakespeare, “The life and death of King Richard the Second”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies: Published According to the True Originall Copies (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act I, scene i], lines 62–66:

[…] Which to maintaine, I would allow him oddes, / And meete him, were I tide to runne afoote, / Euen to the frozen ridges of the Alpes, / Or any other ground inhabitable, / Where euer Engliſhman durſt ſet his foote.

Inhabitable can also be an antonym of uninhabitable and have the opposite meaning to that intended. Where such confusion might arise, one may prefer to use uninhabitable or another synonym. Compare uninteresting. Fortunately, this opposite meaning is obsolete and the sense of "suitable for life" is far more prevalent today.

I found two sources that do list the alternative definition of inhabitable. However in both cases it is listed side by side with the usual definition, and they are marked as obsolete. It is safe to assume that it is a relic of the past since the examples presented are very old. However as pointed out in the comments natives do occasionally make this mistake.

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Latin had vowel lengthening before sonorants, so īnhabit would be classically distinguished from in- at some point early in Latin, but not always written and, as it turns out, it would not be properly pronounced. This distiction was eventually lost, but English in- from a separate path of transmission remains distinct from un-. So inhabit and uninhabitable are the preferred words to use.

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  • Vowel lengthening does not occur in Latin before -nh-, only before -ns- and -nf-. The letter H generally acts like it doesn't exist in the Latin sound system.
    – sumelic
    Commented Sep 23, 2023 at 6:18

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