Town

A town is a community of people ranging from a few hundred to several thousands (occasionally hundreds of thousands), although it may be applied loosely even to huge metropolitan areas. more...

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Usually, a \"town\" is thought of as larger than a village but smaller than a \"city\", though there are exceptions to this rule. The words \"city\" and \"village\" came into English from Latin via French. \"Town\" and \"borough\" (also \"burrow\", \"burgh\", \"bury\", etc.) are of native Germanic origin, from Old English burg, a fortified settlement, and tūn, an enclosed piece of land.

Origin and use around the world

In Old English and Old Scots, \"Town\" (or \"toun\", \"ton\", etc.) originally meant a fortified municipality, whereas a borough was not fortified. But that distinction did not last long, and \"Edina Burgh\" or \"Edinburgh\" - modernly called a \"city\" - was a fortified \"town\" from its founding.

In modern American English, a town is usually a municipal corporation that is smaller than a city but larger than a village. In some cases, \"town\" is an alternate name for \"city\" or \"village\" (especially a larger village). Sometimes, the word \"town\" is short for \"township.\" Some US states designate towns and townships as political subdivisions of Counties. In general, towns can be differentiated from townships, villages, or hamlets on the basis of their economic character, in that most of a town's population will tend to derive their living from manufacturing industry, commerce, and public service rather than primary industry such as agriculture or related activities.

A place's population size is not a reliable determinant of urban character. In many areas of the world, as in India at least until recent times, a large village might contain several times as many people as a small town. In the United Kingdom, there are historical cities that are far smaller than the larger towns.

The modern phenomenon of extensive suburban growth, satellite urban development, and migration of city-dwellers to villages have further complicated the definition of towns, creating communities urban in their economic and cultural characteristics but lacking other characteristics of urban localities.

Some forms of non-rural settlement, such as temporary mining locations, may be clearly non-rural, but have at best a questionable claim to be called a town.

The distinction between a town and a city similarly depends on the approach adopted: a city may strictly be an administrative entity which has been granted that designation by law, but in informal usage, the term is also used to denote an urban locality of a particular size or importance: whereas a medieval city may have possessed as few as 10,000 inhabitants, today some consider an urban place of fewer than 100,000 as a town, even though there are many officially designated cities that are very, very much smaller than that.

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