Other forms: downtowns
Downtown is the busy central part of a city. Go downtown, downtown Chicago, the downtown area.
It is American, and in New York it is literal — downtown is south, uptown is north — which is where the word began before spreading to mean any city centre. British English says city centre or town centre and does not use downtown at all except in imitation. Note that downtown works as noun, adjective and adverb without changing shape.
1noundowntownThe busy central part of a city.
“Downtown is full of office towers, shops and restaurants.”
2adverbtowardsIn or towards that part.
“We took the subway downtown to see a show.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
downtown is a part of a city.
Also accepted in games: city center, city centre, center
Down plus town. In nineteenth-century Manhattan the original settlement was at the southern tip, so going into town meant going down the island.
From down + town.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA