Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A usually residential area or community outlying a city.
  • noun The usually residential region around a major city; the environs.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun An outlying part of a city or town; a part outside of the city boundaries but adjoining them: often used in the plural to signify loosely some part near a city: as, a garden situated in the suburbs of London. The form suburbs was formerly often used as a singular.
  • noun The confines; the outskirts.
  • Suburban; suited to the suburbs, or to the less well regulated parts of a city.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun An outlying part of a city or town; a smaller place immediately adjacent to a city; in the plural, the region which is on the confines of any city or large town.
  • noun Hence, the confines; the outer part; the environment.
  • noun [Obs.] a rowdy; a loafer.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun the area on the periphery of a city or large town that falls between being truly part of the city, but is not countryside either.
  • noun any subdivision of a conurbation, not necessarily on the periphery.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a residential district located on the outskirts of a city

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English suburbe, from Old French, from Latin suburbium : sub-, sub- + urbs, urb-, city.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Old French suburbe, subburbe, from Latin suburbium, from sub- + urbs ("city").

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Examples

  • To Carol and me, even the word suburb was exciting: it meant a city was attached to it.

    The Guardian World News Allegra McEvedy 2011

  • Internationally the term suburb conjures up images of a quiet, relatively unspoilt, less densely populated and predominantly residential community in the vicinity of a city.

    Recently Uploaded Slideshows 2009

  • REVOLUTIONARY ROAD: Jason Statham drives an 18-wheeler full of nitro into the title suburb, blows everything to shit, and then spends 90 minutes hunting down absolutely everyone involved with the making of this film, beating them to death with TV trays.

    Metal Lungies 2009

  • On the surface, Annie Powers’s life in a wealthy Floridian suburb is happy and idyllic.

    Black Out by Lisa Unger: Book summary 2010

  • As dusk approaches a small Dublin suburb in the summer of 1984, mothers begin to call their children home.

    In the Woods by Tana French: Book summary 2010

  • When a certain suburb decides to resurface the street in front of your house, how much of that gas tax is the suburb getting and using on the project?

    Matthew Yglesias » By Request: Missing the Trees 2009

  • From a “Mother Earth/Gaia” point of view building a city or suburb is far more destructive than building a mine, or building 50 mines for that matter.

    Democrats declare war on West Virginia. Again. - Moe_Lane’s blog - RedState 2009

  • But the Cleveland suburb is 10 times the size of Mission Hills, has a far more diverse population, and for other reasons does not fit the pattern he describes.

    2009 April 16 « One-Minute Book Reviews 2009

  • The walk up to Atul Ruia's corporate office in Mahalaxmi, a central Mumbai suburb, is rather deceptive.

    India's Atul Ruia T. Surendar 2010

  • The walk up to Atul Ruia's corporate office in Mahalaxmi, a central Mumbai suburb, is rather deceptive.

    India's Atul Ruia T. Surendar 2010

Comments

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  • From Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution "the Suburb" - meaning something like a place of inferior or debased habits of life.

    March 6, 2011