Metropolis
nounA large, busy city, especially the main city of a country or region.
How to spell metropolis
10 letters · 4 syllables
How to pronounce metropolis
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does metropolis mean?
- nounA large, busy city, especially the main city of a country or region.
Metropolis in a sentence
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After years in a quiet village, she moved to the metropolis for work.
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The financial firm relocated its headquarters to the metropolis.
Where does metropolis come from?
Language of origin: Greek
The word comes from the Greek mētropolis, which literally meant 'mother city'. It joins mētēr, meaning 'mother', with polis, meaning 'city', and originally described the founding city of a Greek colony, the home town from which settlers had set out. Over time the sense broadened to mean a chief or capital city, and the word passed through Late Latin into English in the 1500s, at first in an ecclesiastical sense for the principal city of a province governed by a bishop. The same polis root sits inside familiar words like 'politics' and 'police', while mētēr is the distant cousin of 'maternal'. The spelling trap is the unstressed middle: writers hear 'me-TROP-o-lis' and can lose track of the single 'l' and the 'o' before 'lis'.
How the word is built
- metro- (from mētēr: mother)
- polis (city)
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