Other forms: towns
A town is a place with streets and shops, bigger than a village and smaller than a city. A market town, the next town, go into town.
In Britain the line between town and city is legal rather than about size: a city is a place granted city status by the monarch, which is why some cities are tiny. Go into town means to the town centre, with no article. Note town hall, town centre, hometown, out of town; and man about town, ghost town, and go to town on something, meaning to do it thoroughly.
1nountownA place with streets and shops, bigger than a village.~98%
“She grew up in a small town where everyone knew each other's names.”
2nouncentralThe central shopping area.~2%
“She went into town for about an hour.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 19 sentences found in the wild and placed 17 of them on a sense (2 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
town is a settlement.
Old English tun meant an enclosure or a farmstead — the same word as German Zaun, a fence. The place began as its boundary, which is why so many English place names end in -ton.
Middle English
toun
English, today
town
From Middle English toun. Cognate with stq Tuun (“garden”), West Frisian tún (“enclosure, garden”), Dutch tuin (“garden”), German Low German Tuun (“fence”), {{cog|de|
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA