Adjacent Words

Village definitions

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Webster's 1828 Dictionary

VIL'LAGE, n. A small assemblage of houses, less than a town or city, and inhabited chiefly by farmers and other laboring people. In England, it is said that a village is distinguished from a town by the want of a market.
In the United States, no such distinction exists, and any small assemblage of houses in the country is called a village.

WordNet (r) 3.0 (2005)

n
1: a community of people smaller than a town [syn: village, small town, settlement]
2: a settlement smaller than a town [syn: village, hamlet]
3: a mainly residential district of Manhattan; `the Village' became a home for many writers and artists in the 20th century [syn: Greenwich Village, Village]

Merriam Webster's

noun Usage: often attributive Etymology: Middle English, from Anglo-French vilage, from vil manorial estate, farmstead, from Latin villa Date: 14th century 1. a. a settlement usually larger than a hamlet and smaller than a town b. an incorporated minor municipality 2. the residents of a village 3. something (as an aggregation of burrows or nests) suggesting a village 4. a territorial area having the status of a village especially as a unit of local government

Oxford Reference Dictionary

n. 1 a a group of houses and associated buildings, larger than a hamlet and smaller than a town, esp. in a rural area. b the inhabitants of a village regarded as a community. 2 Brit. a self-contained district or community within a town or city, regarded as having features characteristic of village life. 3 US a small municipality with limited corporate powers. 4 Austral. a select suburban shopping centre. Derivatives: villager n. villagey adj. Etymology: ME f. OF f. L villa

Webster's 1913 Dictionary

Village Vil"lage (?; 48), n. [F., fr. L. villaticus belonging to a country house or villa. See Villa, and cf. Villatic.] A small assemblage of houses in the country, less than a town or city. Village cart, a kind of two-wheeled pleasure carriage without a top. Syn: Village, Hamlet, Town, City. Usage: In England, a hamlet denotes a collection of houses, too small to have a parish church. A village has a church, but no market. A town has both a market and a church or churches. A city is, in the legal sense, an incorporated borough town, which is, or has been, the place of a bishop's see. In the United States these distinctions do not hold.

Collin's Cobuild Dictionary

(villages) Frequency: The word is one of the 1500 most common words in English. A village consists of a group of houses, together with other buildings such as a church and a school, in a country area. He lives quietly in the country in a village near Lahti. ...the village school. N-COUNT

International Standard Bible Encyclopedia

vil'-aj (qaphar, chawwoth, qatserim, banoth, perazoth; kome):

(1) The general term for a village, in common with Aramaic and Arabic is qaphar (So 7:11; 1Ch 27:25; kopher; 1Sa 6:18; kephir, Ne 6:2). This designation is derived from the idea of its offering "cover" or shelter. It is used in combination, and place-names of this formation became prominent in post-Biblical times, probably because the villages so named had then grown into towns. A well-known Biblical instance of such names is Capernaum.

(2) Chawwoth (always "town" in English Versions of the Bible; see HAVVOTH-JAIR) means originally a group of tents (Arabic chiwa'). These in settled life soon became more permanent dwellings, or what we understand by a village. The term, however, is applied only to the villages of Jair in the tribe of Manasseh (Nu 32:41; 1Ki 4:13).

(3) Chatserim likewise came from nomadic life. They were originally enclosures specially for cattle, alongside of which dwellings for the herdsmen and peasantry naturally grew up (see HAZAR-ADDAR; HAZOR). They were unwalled (Le 25:31) and lay around the cities (Jos 19:8).

(4) Banoth is literally "daughters." The word is applied to the dependent villages lying around the larger cities, and to which they looked as to a kind of metropolis (Nu 21:25, etc.); the Revised Version (British and American) "towns" except in Nu 32:42.

(5) Perazoth means "the open country," but it soon came to mean the villages scattered in the open (Eze 38:11; Zec 2:4; Es 9:19). Some have sought to connect the Perizzites with this word and to regard them, not as a distinct people, but as the peasant class. Attempts have also been m

ade to connect perazon in Jud 5:7,11 with the same root, and the King James Version rendered it "inhabitants of the villages." the Revised Version (British and American), on the contrary, gives it the meaning of "rulers." The versions indicate a word meaning authority, and probably the text should be emended to read rozenim, "rulers." A similar emendation is required in Hab 3:14. "Village" in the Revised Version (British and American) of the New Testament invariably represents the Greek kome, but in 2 Macc 8:6 the Revised Version (British and American) Apocrypha has "village" for chora, lit. "country."

See CITY; TOWN.

W. M. Christie

Soule's Dictionary of English Synonyms

n. Hamlet, town.

Moby Thesaurus

Kreis, archbishopric, archdiocese, arrondissement, bailiwick, bishopric, borough, burghal, canton, citified, city, civic, commune, congressional district, constablewick, country town, county, crossroads, departement, diocese, district, downtown, duchy, electoral district, electorate, government, ham, hamlet, hundred, interurban, magistracy, metropolis, metropolitan, metropolitan area, midtown, municipal, oblast, okrug, oppidan, parish, precinct, principality, province, region, riding, sheriffalty, sheriffwick, shire, shrievalty, soke, stake, state, suburban, territory, thorp, town, township, uptown, urban, wapentake, ward, wick