Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A place, especially with reference to a particular event.
  • noun The scene or setting, as of a novel.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A place, spot, or locality; specifically, a site or scene, considered with reference to circumstances connected with it.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun A place, spot, or location.
  • noun A principle, practice, form of speech, or other thing of local use, or limited to a locality.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun The place where something happens.
  • noun computing The set of settings related to the language and region in which a computer program executes. Examples are language, paper format, currency and time formats, character encoding etc.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun the scene of any event or action (especially the place of a meeting)

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[From French local, local, locale, from Old French; see local.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From French local (adj), nominal use of the adjective.

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Examples

Comments

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  • This is a strange word. And if anyone ever told me, "The locale of a crime" I would burst out laughing no matter how gruesome the crime.

    November 1, 2011