Meaning & use
urban
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Meanings
adjectivebefore a noun
Connected with a city or large town, or located there.
Grammar: Almost always comes before a noun: urban life, urban areas.
Patterns
- urban areas
- urban life
- urban planning
More than half the world's people now live in urban areas.
Urban traffic is heavy at rush hour.
The city council has a plan to reduce urban pollution.
adjectivebefore a nouninformal
Describing a style of music, fashion or culture that grew out of city life, especially among young Black communities.
Grammar: Used in the arts and marketing: urban music, urban fashion.
Patterns
- urban music
- urban culture
- urban fashion
The radio station plays a mix of pop and urban music.
The urban fashion label launched a new collection of sneakers.
The festival celebrates urban culture through dance and street art.
Common combinations
- urban area
- The urban area keeps growing along the river.
- urban planning
- Good urban planning includes parks and cycle lanes.
- urban sprawl
- Urban sprawl has swallowed the farmland around the city.
- urban population
- The urban population has doubled in thirty years.
- urban legend
- The story about the alligators in the sewers is an urban legend.
- inner-city urban
- The charity works in poor urban neighborhoods.
Synonyms and how they differ
- metropolitan
- Metropolitan refers to a large city and its surrounding region, so it sounds bigger and more official than urban.
- city
- City works as a modifier too, as in city life, but urban sounds more formal and general.
- municipal
- Municipal means connected with the local government of a town or city, not with its character.
- civic
- Civic relates to citizens and their duties, not to the built environment.
Opposites
Word family
- urbanize verb
- to make an area more like a city
- urbanization noun
- the growth of cities and city life
- urbanite noun
- a person who lives in a city
- suburban adjective
- relating to residential areas on the edge of a city
Commonly confused: urban or urbane?
urban vs urbane
Urbane means polite, smooth and well-mannered, as in an urbane host; it is pronounced differently and does not mean relating to cities.
Practice
Which word is the usual opposite of urban?
Choose one answer.
Rural means connected with the countryside, the standard contrast to urban. Suburban means on a city's edge, so it is a related but different zone.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “urban”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.