Just for the helluva it yesterday, I signed up for one of those Word-of-the-Day listserves, and, wouldn't you know it, my first word was an urban one.
Word of the Day for Thursday October 13, 2005
conurbation \kon-uhr-BAY-shuhn\, noun:
An aggregation or continuous network of urban communities.
To live there in that great smoking conurbation rumbling
with the constant thunder of locomotives, filled with the
moaning of train whistles coming down the Potomac Valley,
was beyond my most fevered hopes.
--Russell Baker, "Memoir of a Small-Town Boyhood," [1]New
York Times, September 12, 1982
Indeed the population in the greater London conurbation
grew by 125 per cent in the period 1861 to 1911 when the
population of England as a whole grew by 80 per cent.
--Terence Brown, The [2]Life of W. B. Yeats
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Conurbation is from Latin con-, "with, together" + urbs,
"city" + the suffix [3]-ation.
References
1. http://www.nytimes.com/
2. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0631228519/ref=nosim/lexico
3. http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=-ation
Dictionary.com Entry and Pronunciation
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?r=9&q=conurbation
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