Midtown

How to spell midtown

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce midtown

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does midtown mean?

1. nounThe central part of a city, lying between the downtown district and the outer areas.
2. adjectiveLocated in or relating to the central part of a city.

Midtown in a sentence

• noun

  The new office tower stands right in the heart of midtown.

• adjective

  She rented a small midtown apartment near her workplace.

• noun

  They booked a hotel in midtown so they could walk to the theatres.

• adjective

  The firm moved its headquarters to a midtown address last spring.

Where does midtown come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent compound built from two very old English elements. The first part, 'mid', comes from Old English 'midd', meaning 'middle' or 'central', a word with deep Germanic roots that also survives in 'midday', 'midnight', and 'amid'. The second part, 'town', descends from Old English 'tun', which originally meant an enclosure, a farmstead, or a fenced settlement before it broadened over the centuries to mean a populated place larger than a village. Joined together, the compound names the part of a city that lies between the downtown core and the outer districts. The term became especially established in American English in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, where it is famously attached to the central business strip of Manhattan, and because both halves are familiar everyday words, the only spelling decision is simply running them together as one solid word.

How the word is built

• mid- (middle)
• town (an urban settlement)