Rooted in the idea of enclosure, this noun most often denotes the open courtyards surrounding Israel's sacred and royal buildings—the courts of the tabernacle (Exod 27:9ff.), the temple (Ps 84:11; 96:8), and royal palaces (1 Kgs 7:8). The multilingual evidence is strikingly uniform: English 'court/courtyard,' Spanish 'atrio,' French 'parvis,' German 'Vorhof' all point to the same architectural reality. In two rare occurrences (1 Chr 4:32–33), the word shifts to mean unwalled settlements or villages, where Spanish 'aldeas' and the plural form signal a distinct semantic extension from enclosed space to open habitation.