Uptown

How to spell uptown

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce uptown

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does uptown mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to or located in the residential, often more affluent, upper part of a town or city.
2. adverbToward or in the upper or northern residential part of a town or city.

Uptown in a sentence

• adjective

  They rented a small uptown apartment near the park.

• adverb

  After the meeting they walked uptown to catch the train home.

• adjective

  The gallery moved to a quieter uptown neighbourhood last spring.

• adverb

  The bus runs uptown every fifteen minutes during the afternoon.

Where does uptown come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent compound formed in English from the everyday adverb 'up' and the noun 'town'. The 'town' element traces back to the Old English 'tun', which originally meant an enclosed piece of land or a farmstead before it broadened to mean a settlement; the same root survives in place name endings like '-ton'. 'Uptown' itself is an American coinage of the early 1800s, describing the part of a city lying away from the commercial waterfront or business core, which in cities such as New York happened to be the northern, more residential end. Because money and grander housing often clustered there, the word picked up an extra flavour of fashionable wealth, so that calling something 'uptown' could imply it was upscale. The spelling is simply the two words run together, which is why the only thing to remember is that it stays solid, with no hyphen and no space.

How the word is built

• up- (upper, higher part)
• town (settlement, from Old English tun: enclosure, homestead)