dhabitants

Dhabitants is not a standalone lexical item in standard French, but the elided form d'habitants, created by combining de with habitants. It functions as a genitive modifier that links a quantity or characteristic to a population. In ordinary usage, d'habitants appears after a head noun such as nombre or population to specify how many people are being discussed, for example: le nombre d'habitants de Paris ou la croissance du nombre d'habitants en région. The spelling follows French orthography, with the elision of de before a vowel, yielding d'habitants rather than de habitants.

Etymology and grammar: The construction derives from the preposition de meaning "of" or "about" and the plural noun habitants meaning "inhabitants." As a modifier, d'habitants does not stand alone; it requires a preceding noun to form a complete phrase, typically indicating size, composition, or distribution of a population.

Usage and contexts: d'habitants is particularly common in statistical and demographic writing, municipal reports, census summaries, and urban planning documents. It helps compactly express population-related attributes, such as "densité d'habitants par kilomètre carré" or "répartition des d'habitants par tranche d'âge" (the latter often appearing as d'habitants in more formal tables or summaries).

Differences and related terms: Habitants is the plural noun meaning "inhabitants" on its own. The phrase d'habitants contrasts with other genitive forms in French (par exemple, "des habitants," "de la population") and is often interchangeable with "nombre d'habitants" when the emphasis is on quantity rather than on the inhabitants themselves.

See also: population, démographie, habitant, statistique.