conurbation
noun
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When Sir Patrick Geddes, a Scottish biologist turned sociologist, sat down in 1915 to write Cities in Evolution, a work on urban planning, he needed a word. How should he refer to thickly populated regions consisting of a sprawling range of cities clustered together? "Some name, then, for these city-regions, these town aggregates, is wanted…. What of 'conurbations'?" he asked rhetorically early on in his work. For his coinage, Geddes combined urbs (the Latin word for "city," already familiar in urban and suburb) with the Latin prefix con- ("together") and the English noun suffix -ation. It turned out that his word suited English speakers just fine-we've been using it ever since.
Examples of conurbation in a Sentence
Arnaud Devigne, Forbes, 21 Feb. 2024
Roads, office parks, and malls line the site now, part of the conurbation known as the Arizona Sun Corridor.
—Amity Shlaes, National Review, 10 Jan. 2024
This was no easy task in the jumble of a vast nineteenth-century conurbation.
—Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker, 2 Oct. 2023
Riyadh Air, based in Saudi Arabia’s namesake capital, a conurbation of 8 million people, will commence flights in 2025, aiming to serve 100 cities by 2030.
—Phil Wahba, Fortune, 22 Aug. 2023
L’Asile, a conurbation of 52,000 people living mostly in rural communities, was founded in the 1930s.
—Washington Post, 21 Aug. 2021
Normally this takes an hour and 40 minutes, moving across the greater Los Angeles/Orange County conurbation, but this trip...
—WSJ, 24 Mar. 2020
Dubai, a remarkable city-emirate grown rich on the foresight of its rulers and the wits of its inhabitants—both native and immigrant—is much the more complex of the two modern conurbations.
—Tunku Varadarajan, WSJ, 31 Jan. 2020
The Los Angeles Basin is framed by the Tehachapi and San Gabriel mountain ranges, which border the urban conurbation to its north and east, the directions the winds are coming from.
—Wes Siler, Outside Online, 23 Oct. 2019
These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'conurbation.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
Dictionary Entries Near conurbation
Cite this Entry
“Conurbation.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/conurbation. Accessed 19 Apr. 2024.
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conurbation
noun
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