suburb
Pluralsuburbs
- 1A residential area on the edge of a city or large town, usually with its own schools, stores, and other businesses serving the people who live there.
After years downtown, the family settled in a leafy suburb with good schools.
New shopping centers sprang up across the suburbs as more people moved out of the city.
Similaroutskirts
Note
Latin suburbium places the district just below or outside the city: sub- plus urbs, "city." The French-borrowed word displaced a native Old English one, underburg, literally "under-city." Earlier usage pictures a walled town with settlement spilling past its gates. Henry Hallam in 1818 counts London's people within its walls and adds that "the suburbs were very populous." The plural with the names the whole surrounding belt rather than one district.
- 2In British usage, any subdivision of a large urban area, not necessarily on its outer edge.
The address falls within a central suburb, despite being minutes from the main railway station.
Planners divided the conurbation into dozens of named suburbs for administrative purposes.
Similardistrict, neighborhood
Note
In Australian, Irish, New Zealand and British English, the word can name any district of a conurbation, inner ones included. A reader who knows only the edge-of-town meaning may find a phrase like "an inner suburb" self-contradictory, but in these varieties it is ordinary. There the word works much like district or neighborhood, and location relative to the center is not part of its meaning.
- 3The outer part of something; the surrounding area or environs.
His thoughts wandered to the shadowy suburb of memory, where old faces blurred together.
Wildflowers grew thick in the suburbs of the meadow, where forest met open ground.
Similaredge, fringe, periphery, outskirts
Oppositecenter
Note
A figurative stretch of the town word, at home in seventeenth-century prose and verse. Jeremy Taylor writes of "the suburbs of sorrow" in 1651, and Milton of "the suburb of their straw-built citadel" in Paradise Lost. It nearly always takes of and names the fringe of something, often something abstract. Today it sounds deliberately literary, because the image only works if the residential meaning shows through.
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Origin
Borrowed through Old French suburbe from Latin suburbium, which combines sub- with urbs ("city"). It displaced the native Old English underburg, literally "under-city".