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Small town" redirects here. For other uses, see Small Town (disambiguation).
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Left to right, from top: Reading in England, Porvoo in Finland, Lemgo in Germany, Davos in Switzerland, Skalica in Slovakia, Ubud in Bali (Indonesia), Fátima in Portugal, Viljandi in Estonia.
A town is a type of a human settlement, generally larger than a village but smaller than a city.[1]
The criteria for distinguishing a town vary globally, often depending on factors such as population size, economic character, administrative status, or historical significance. In some regions, towns are formally defined by legal charters or government designations, while in others, the term is used informally. Towns typically feature centralized services, infrastructure, and governance, such as municipal authorities, and serve as hubs for commerce, education, and cultural activities within their regions.
The concept of a town varies culturally and legally. For example, in the United Kingdom, a town may historically derive its status from a market town designation or royal charter, while in the United States, the term is often loosely applied to incorporated municipalities. In some countries, such as Australia and Canada, distinctions between towns, cities, and rural areas are based on population thresholds. Globally, towns play diverse roles, ranging from agricultural service centers to suburban communities within metropolitan areas.
Etymology
The word "town" shares an origin with the German word Zaun ("fence"), the Dutch word tuin ("garden, yard; fence, enclosure"), and the Old Norse tún ("enclosure, as for a homestead").[2] The original Proto-Germanic word, *tūną, is thought to be an early borrowing from *dūnom (cf. Old Irish dún, Welsh din).[3]
The original sense of the word in both Germanic and Celtic was that of a fortress or an enclosure. Cognates of the English word town in many modern Germanic languages designate a "fence" or a "hedge".[3] In English and Dutch, the meaning of the word took on the sense of the space which these fences enclosed, and through which a track must run.[citation needed] In England, a "town" was a small community that could not afford or was not allowed to build walls or other larger fortifications, and built a palisade or stockade instead.[citation needed] In the Netherlands, this space was a garden, more specifically those of the wealthy, which had a high fence or a wall around them (like the garden of the palace of Het Loo in Apeldoorn, which was the model for the privy garden of William III and Mary II at Hampton Court). In Old Norse tún means a (grassy) place between farmhouses, and the word is still used with a similar meaning in modern Norwegian.
Old English tūn became a common place-name suffix in England and southeastern Scotland during the Anglo-Saxon settlement period. In Old English and Early and Middle Scots, the words ton, toun, etc. could refer to diverse kinds of settlements from agricultural estates and holdings, partly picking up the Norse sense (as in the Scots word fermtoun) at one end of the scale, to fortified municipalities.[1] Other common Anglo-Saxon suffixes included ham 'home', stede 'stead', and burh 'bury, borough, burgh'.
In toponymic terminology, names of individual towns and cities are called astyonyms or astionyms (from Ancient Greek ἄστυ 'town, city', and ὄνομα 'name').[4]
Meaning
In some cases, town is an alternative name for "city" or "village" (especially a small city or large village; and occasionally even hamlets). Sometimes, the word town is short for township. In general, today towns can be differentiated from townships, villages, or hamlets on the basis of their economic character, in that most of a town's population will tend to derive their living from manufacturing industry, commerce, and public services rather than primary sector industries such as agriculture or related activities.
A place's population size is not a reliable determinant of urban character. In many areas of the world, e.g. in India at least until recent times, a large village might contain several times as many people as a small town. In the United Kingdom, there are historical cities that are far smaller than the larger towns.
The modern phenomenon of extensive suburban growth, satellite urban development, and migration of city dwellers to villages has further complicated the definition of towns, creating communities urban in their economic and cultural characteristics but lacking other characteristics of urban localities.
Some forms of non-rural settlement, such as temporary mining locations, may be clearly non-rural, but have at best a questionable claim to be called a town.
Towns often exist as distinct governmental units, with legally defined borders and some or all of the appurtenances of local government (e.g. a police force). In the United States these are referred to as "incorporated towns". In other cases the town lacks its own governance and is said to be "unincorporated". The existence of an unincorporated town may be legally set out by other means, e.g. zoning districts. In the case of some planned communities, the town exists legally in the form of covenants on the properties within the town. The United States census identifies many census-designated places (CDPs) by the names of unincorporated towns which lie within them; however, those CDPs typically include rural and suburban areas and even surrounding villages and other towns.
The distinction between a town and a city similarly depends on the approach: a city may strictly be an administrative entity which has been granted that designation by law, but in informal usage, the term is also used to denote an urban locality of a particular size or importance: whereas a medieval city may have possessed as few as 10,000 inhabitants, today some[who?] consider an urban place of fewer than 100,000 as a town, even though there are many officially designated cities that are much smaller than that.
Starting in March 2021, the then-193 member states of the United Nations have been involved in an effort led by EU aparatusses to agree on a common statistical definition of cities, towns and rural areas