Transcript of “Plat Neighborhood”
Hi, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Dan Croft. I’m calling from Atlantic Beach, Florida.
Hi, Dan. Welcome to the show. What can we do for you?
I grew up in a community in southwestern Ohio. And when I was growing up there, we referred to everyone’s subdivision and their particular community as a plat, P-L-A-T, as in, you know, what plat do you live in? We’ll come over to your plat. And it was just a normal term of communication. But when I got to college and subsequently, when I used the term plat, people looked at me like I had two heads. They’d never heard that before. So it feels like that was maybe a, I don’t know, like a very specific regionalism or something. And I was curious about the origin of that phrase plat for a subdivision.
This is all kind of clicking for me. Let me ask you some questions. Did your plats have names? Yes. So every plant did have an individual name. I grew up in an area called Knollwood. Other subdivisions were called Sugar Creek or Terra Estates. It was a very suburban area.
Well, the reason I ask is because a plat is kind of a more jargony term. To plat a place is to make a detailed map or chart of it. You show the outline and the key features, the boundaries, and probably where it fits in with surveys and other plats. And so usually it’s a piece of land. A plat is a piece of land that plans are being made for it. Perhaps you have to submit that plant to the county or another governmental body to get approvals for what you’re going to do.
A family looking to buy land and build a house might spend a lot of time looking over plats. If the area is yet to be built up, they’re trying to find the best location without knowing exactly what or who will be nearby once they buy the land. Plat is a well-established term. You’ll find it if you spend any time looking at old surveys or old plans for a neighborhood. But what’s interesting to me is that you use it interchangeably with subdivision.
A lot of times subdivision comes from being a divided part of a plat. That’s where subdivision comes from. In the U.S., we call neighborhoods that are smaller pieces or smaller plots of a plat a subdivision. So it sounds like there’s some mixing of the terms there, and I’m not surprised. My other question for you would be, were you like the first generation to live in that neighborhood?
Not really. I mean, the community was developed. It was a post-war community that was developed primarily probably from the 50s through, I don’t know, the 70s. But there were multi-generations there. Because I could see people who still had within the family’s memory of moving in when it was still brand new. And they had spent the time kind of researching where they would buy and build and looking at the, you know, the surveyor’s maps and the plats and stuff.
But plat, the word, by the way, is directly related to plot, P-L-O-T, meaning a charter map made of a piece of land or a nautical root. It’s just a variant pronunciation of it. And there was a slow diverging, a specialization of the meaning of plat and plot over time as each one kind of took on new connotations.
I see. Well, that helps. Thank you. Yeah, but we are on the air in Ohio, and we will hear from other people probably who use Platin that way. And if we get something, if we can put together enough data, we’ll be sure to talk about it on the program, all right?
Yeah, that sounds great. Thanks very much for your time. And you’ve helped me answer something that I’ve always been curious about. So thank you.
Take care, Dan. Glad to help. Appreciate it. Take care, Dan. Bye-bye.
