municipal

Pluralmunicipals

1. 1
   adjective

   Of or relating to a municipality: a city, town, or other community with the power to administer its own local government.

   The municipal council approved funding to extend bus routes into the new neighborhoods.

   Residents pay a quarterly fee for municipal trash collection.

   Similarcivic, local

   Note

   The everyday sense, and the one closest to its Latin roots. Mūnicipālis described a citizen or a free town, from mūniceps, an inhabitant of such a town, built on mūnus "duty" and capiō "to take". The citizen was literally a duty-taker. Today the word marks the level of government below the province or state, so municipal firefighters work alongside provincial ones. It sits naturally before council, services, elections and water.

2. 2
   nouncountable

   A financial instrument, typically a bond, issued by a municipality to raise funds.

   Investors often favor municipals because the interest is usually exempt from federal income tax.

   She added a ten-year municipal to the conservative side of her portfolio.

   Note

   Finance turned the adjective into a noun by dropping the word it modified: municipals are municipal bonds and similar debt. The noun is almost always used in the plural, as when Janet Fiorenza of Lehman Brothers urged baby boomers in 2008 to buy municipals. Headlines clip it further to muni, as in muni bonds. The adjective survives beside it in phrases like municipal fixed income.

3. 3
   adjective

   Concerning a nation's own internal affairs rather than its dealings with other nations.

   Under its municipal law, the country recognizes dual citizenship even though some treaties discourage it.

   The diplomats declined to comment on what they considered purely municipal questions for the host nation.

   Similardomestic, internal

   Oppositeinternational

   Note

   A lawyer's and diplomat's sense that can trip up readers expecting the city-level meaning. In international law, a state's municipal law is its whole domestic legal order, set against the international law that governs relations between states. It has nothing to do with town ordinances. When the talk is of treaties, sovereignty or foreign ministries, read municipal as "domestic," not "local."

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