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When Should You Use urbane?
City slickers and country folk have long debated whether life is better in town or in the wide-open spaces, and urbane is a term that springs from the throes of that debate. In its earliest English uses, urbane was synonymous with its close relative urban ("of, relating to, characteristic of, or constituting a city"). Both words come from the Latin adjective urbanus ("urban, urbane"), which in turn comes from urbs, meaning "city." The modern sense of urbane developed from the belief (no doubt fostered by cosmopolitan city dwellers) that living in the city made one more suave and polished than did leading a rural life.
Examples of urbane in a Sentence
Katy Waldman, New Yorker, 21 June 2025
Lemon writes that international media tends to depict the metro dogs as urbane, independent citizens who know how to stay calm and go about their business in a crowd.
—Livia Gershon, JSTOR Daily, 7 May 2025
The thriller follows two urbane brothers who witness a baby being kidnapped from an impoverished mother at a railway station in rural India.
—Naman Ramachandran, Variety, 26 May 2025
An urbane middle-aged couple was summoned to the bar for prime seats just as the man was pulling up a BBC video about barnacle geese, a species that nests on high cliffs and whose flightless newborns fling themselves hundreds of feet to reunite with their grazing parents.
—Hilton Als, New Yorker, 16 May 2025
See All Example Sentences for urbane
Cite this Entry
“Urbane.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/urbane. Accessed 1 Jul. 2025.
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