exurb means A residential area beyond the suburbs. It carries an Arena rating of 1358, earned across 97 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, exurb ranks #420 of 17,126 for Most Elegant Words, #2,823 of 17,127 for Words That Escaped Their Books, #3,135 of 17,140 for Most Whimsical Words, #5,330 of 17,132 for Most Betrayed by Its Sound.
exurb is pronounced /ˈɛɡˌzɜːb/.
Why “exurb” is a great word
EXURB — [Noun] A prosperous residential area situated beyond the traditional suburbs of a city. Its name is a blend of 'ex-' (a variant of 'extra-', meaning 'outside of') and 'urban' (from Latin *urbanus*, 'of a city'), coined in 1955 in American English. Unlike a 'suburb,' which clings to the city's infrastructural hem, or a 'bedroom community,' a broader term for any commuter settlement, the exurb is a statement of achieved distance. It is the new house on the five-acre lot, its architectural starkness softened by ornamental birches; the forty-minute reverse-migration in a pristine vehicle along a highway that becomes a country road; and the gourmet market in a repurposed barn. Here, the pastoral ideal is a stage-set, its profound quietude underwritten by the distant metropolis it pretends to have escaped.
Etymology
Blend of extra + urban.
noun
- A residential area beyond the suburbs.e.g.“I had my first taste of a collapsing exurb last night.” — 2008 July 21, Megan McArdle, “Exurbs delenda est”, in The Atlantic:
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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