Suburban describes the ring of housing around the edge of a city, where people live but do not work. Wide quiet streets, a car in every driveway, a strip of front lawn, a twenty-minute train into town.
The noun is a suburb, the whole world of them is suburbia, and someone who lives there is a suburbanite. Suburban trains, a suburban street and suburban sprawl are plain description. But the word carries a second edge: call a person's taste or their life suburban and you mean it is safe, conventional and a little dull. Which of the two you mean comes from the sentence around it. And suburban points at the place, not the person — a suburban lawyer is a lawyer whose office sits out past the ring road.
Latin built the word out of sub-, under, and urbs, city, with the adjective ending -anus: suburbanus, the ground lying just under the city. English kept the pieces exactly as they were, sub- plus urban. What was once the farmland outside the gates is now cul-de-sacs and garden centres.
Latin
suburbanus
English, today
suburban
Built from
From Latin suburbanus, from prefix sub- (“under”) + urbs (“city”) + -anus (“adjective suffix”), equivalent to sub- + urban.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA