Small-town means belonging to quiet provincial life, far from the big city. Everybody knows everybody, for better and for worse.
It goes before a noun with a hyphen, and it carries both halves of its reputation, since small-town values suggests decency and small-town attitudes suggests narrowness. American writing uses it constantly, and a great deal of American fiction is about escaping one. British English says provincial or, more affectionately, village. Which meaning you get depends entirely on the speaker's own history.
1adjectivesmall-townCharacteristic of life in a small provincial town.
“He never lost his small-town suspicion of anything new.”
small + town
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in A Man Called Ove
First appears in chapter 2 of A Man Called Ove.
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