Word of the Day

Sunday, December 10, 2000

conurbation

\kon-uhr-BAY-shuhn\ , noun;

An aggregation or continuous network of urban communities.

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Quotes:

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", 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 Life of W. B. Yeats

Origin:

Conurbation is from Latin con-, with, together + urbs, city + the suffix -ation.