Town

A town is a type of a human settlement. Towns are generally larger than villages and smaller than cities,^[1] though the criteria to distinguish between them vary considerably in different parts of the world.

For other uses, see Town (disambiguation) and Towns (disambiguation).

Etymology[edit]

The word "town" shares an origin with the German word Zaun, the Dutch word tuin, and the Old Norse tún.^[2] The original Proto-Germanic word, *tūnan, is thought to be an early borrowing from Proto-Celtic *dūnom (cf. Old Irish dún, Welsh din).^[3]

The original sense of the word in both Germanic and Celtic was that of a fortress or an enclosure. Cognates of town in many modern Germanic languages designate a fence or a hedge.^[3] In English and Dutch, the meaning of the word took on the sense of the space which these fences enclosed, and through which a track must run. In England, a town was a small community that could not afford or was not allowed to build walls or other larger fortifications, and built a palisade or stockade instead.^[4] In the Netherlands, this space was a garden, more specifically those of the wealthy, which had a high fence or a wall around them (like the garden of the palace of Het Loo in Apeldoorn, which was the model for the privy garden of William III and Mary II at Hampton Court). In Old Norse tún means a (grassy) place between farmhouses, and the word is still used with a similar meaning in modern Norwegian.

Old English tūn became a common place-name suffix in England and southeastern Scotland during the Anglo-Saxon settlement period. In Old English and Early and Middle Scots, the words ton, toun, etc. could refer to diverse kinds of settlements from agricultural estates and holdings, partly picking up the Norse sense (as in the Scots word fermtoun) at one end of the scale, to fortified municipalities.^[1] Other common Anglo-Saxon suffixes included ham 'home', stede 'stead', and burh 'bury, borough, burgh'.

In toponymic terminology, names of individual towns and cities are called astyonyms or astionyms (from Ancient Greek ἄστυ 'town, city', and ὄνομα 'name').^[5]

Infantile towns, with no clear

zoning

Juvenile towns, which have developed an area of

shops

Adolescent towns, where have started to appear

factories

Early mature towns, with a separate area of housing

high-class

Mature towns, with defined , commercial and various types of residential area

industrial

Rustic villas, from where the exploitation of resources was directed, slave workers resided, livestock were kept and production was stored.

Urban villas, in which the resided and which increasingly adopted the architectural and beautification forms typical of urban mansions. When from the first century the great territorial property was divided between the area directly exploited by the lord and that ceded to tenant settlers, urban villas became the centers of the administrative power of the lords, appearing the forms of vassalage typical of feudalism of the fourth century.

lord

Peel is also sometimes referred to as a city by virtue of its cathedral.

Onchan and Port Erin are both larger in population than the smallest "town", having expanded in modern times, but are designated as villages.

Room, Adrian (1996). . Lanham and London: The Scarecrow Press. ISBN 9780810831698.

An Alphabetical Guide to the Language of Name Studies

Australian Bureau of Statistics: Australian Standard Geographical Classification (ASGC) 2005

— Contains information about towns in numerous countries.

Open-Site Regional

: research group, university of Paris-Diderot, France — Access to Geopolis Database