suburbs
- 1Plural of suburb.
The new rail line links three of the western suburbs to the city center.
Some suburbs have their own main streets, schools, and markets.
Note
Here the word counts districts one by one, so it happily takes numbers and words like some or several. What counts as a suburb varies by country: in British, Irish and Australian usage any subdivision of a large urban area can be one, so a city's suburbs need not lie on its edge, while elsewhere the word points to the outskirts. Taken as one region rather than a list, the same word is the suburbs as a whole.
- 2The populated area surrounding a city, taken as a whole.
As rents rose, young couples drifted out to the suburbs.
The suburbs sprawled for miles before the farmland began.
Similaroutskirts
Note
Urban studies treats the whole ring of settlement around a city as a single zone, and this plural is its name for it. Used this way, the word never takes a number and almost always comes with the: the suburbs are growing, moving out to the suburbs, never a suburbs or three suburbs. To pick out one district instead, switch to the singular suburb and its ordinary count plural.
suburbs is a form of suburb
suburb, noun: A 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. Full entry
- Forms
- suburbsuburbs plural
- Spelling
- suburb → suburbs: add -s
- Sound
- The ending sounds like /z/.
Use it in a sentence
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