pays

Pays is a French noun that means country, land, or region. In everyday usage, un pays can denote a sovereign state or a geographic area within a state. The plural les pays refers to multiple nations, or to a set of regions considered collectively. The term also appears in regional and historical contexts to describe areas with shared culture, language, or history, such as Pays Basque (the Basque Country) or Pays d’Oc, where pays denotes traditional cultural regions rather than administrative units.

Etymology: The word derives from Latin pagus, meaning a rural district or county, and entered French via Old French as pais or pays. Through successive phonetic changes, the modern form pays stabilized and acquired its current sense of a geographic or political territory.

Usage notes: In contemporary French, the possessive phrase mon pays means “my homeland” and does not necessarily correspond to the political boundaries of France. The term is masculine: le pays; plural: les pays. In toponymy, many regional names incorporate pays to indicate a broader region, as in Pays de la Loire. In English-language contexts, pays appears mainly in loan phrases or in discussions of French geography, rather than as a standard English word.

See also: country, homeland, toponymy, Pays Basque, Pays d’Oc, Loire region.