There are 16 meanings listed in OED's entry for the noun town , two of which are labelled obsolete. Some consonants can take the function of the vowel in unstressed syllables. View the pronunciation model here. Simple text respell breaks words into syllables, separated by a hyphen.
The syllable which carries the primary stress is written in capital letters. This key covers both British and U. English Simple Text Respell. It is similar in frequency to words like e. More about OED's frequency bands. Historical frequency series are derived from Google Books Ngrams version 2 , a data set based on the Google Books corpus of several million books printed in English between and The overall frequency for a given word is calculated by summing frequencies for the main form of the word, any plural or inflected forms, and any major spelling variations.
For sets of homographs distinct entries that share the same word-form, e. This may result in inaccuracies. Modern frequency series are derived from a corpus of 20 billion words, covering the period from to the present.
The corpus is mainly compiled from online news sources, and covers all major varieties of World English. Skip to main content. Dictionary Historical Thesaurus. What does the noun town mean? About occurrences per million words in modern written English.
See frequency. How is the noun town pronounced? See pronunciation. Earliest known use Old English. The earliest known use of the noun town is in the Old English period pre See etymology. Old English— town, v. Summary A word inherited from Germanic. In sense I. Notes Developments in Germanic and Celtic. The differing senses found in the Celtic and Germanic languages may in part reflect different settlement traditions in the pre-Roman Iron Age, with heavily enclosed settlements common in the Celtic -speaking world including Britain and Gaul , but not in the continental regions in which Germanic languages are eventually attested.
