Suburbs

How to spell suburbs

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce suburbs

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does suburbs mean?

1. nounThe residential districts lying on the outer edges of a city or large town.

Suburbs in a sentence

• Many families move to the suburbs for larger gardens and quieter streets.

• The new rail line connects the city centre to the northern suburbs.

Where does suburbs come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word goes back to the Latin suburbium, the term for the built-up district lying just outside the walls of a town. It was formed from sub, meaning 'near' or 'close under', and urbs, meaning 'city', so it literally described the area pressed up against the edge of the city. English took it in during the 1300s by way of Anglo-Norman French, originally as 'suburb', referring to the outskirts where housing and trade spilled beyond the formal town boundary. The same urbs root still lives in everyday relatives like 'urban' and 'urbane', and keeping that root in mind explains the single b in the middle: it is urb, the city, with sub in front, not a doubled letter. The modern sense of leafy residential districts ringing a city grew in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as transport let people live away from where they worked.

How the word is built

• sub- (near, close to)
• urb (from Latin urbs: city)
• -s (plural)