I was startled to see the word suburb in John Keats’s “Lamia” (1819):
When from the slope side of a suburb hill,Quick, call the HOA!
Deafening the swallow’s twitter, came a thrill
Of trumpets
But suburb long predates the ’burbs and their homeowner associations. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word thusly:
The area immediately outside a town or city; the area belonging to a town or city that lies immediately outside its walls or boundaries. Now: the outlying parts of a city (either beyond or just within the city boundaries), typically residential in nature; the parts of a city outside the commercial and civic centre.The dictionary traces the word to Latin and French, with a first citation from c. 1350, as given in The Earliest Complete English Prose Psalter (1892): “Her uines is of þe uine of Sode-mens & of þe suburbes of Gomorre.” That’s from Deuteronomy 32:32: “For their vine is of the vine of Sodom, and of the fields of Gomorrah” (KJV).
[Word found in The Eve of St Agnes, no. 13 in the Penguin Little Black Classics series (2015).]
comments: 4
You and Zippy and your etymology addiction! (I love that stuff myself.)
Stop me before I sign in again! (To the OED.)
I recently ‘discovered’ my copy of The Oxford Universal Dictionary On Historical Principles (published in 1933; my edition “with corrections and revised addenda, 1955”) that I inherited from my father, but had misplaced for many years. I was surprised to see how close its definition was to the one you found in the online version: “The country lying immediately outside a town or city; more particularly, those residential parts belonging to a town or city which lie immediately outside and adjacent to its walls or boundaries; Any of such residential parts, having a definite designation, boundary, or organization; Outlying parts, outskirts, confines, purlieus.” I guess I shouldn’t be surprised as it’s the same company after all.
Yep. The online OED has some citations from the 1990s for the word, and this note must be a recent addition: “In modern use oftendisparaging, implying a homogeneity, monotony, and dull ordinariness within such areas.”
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