outskirts
Britishplural noun
Explanation
Some people like to live downtown. Others prefer the open spaces of the suburbs. But if you live in between the two, you are in the outskirts, the place where the city ends and the suburbs begin. Outskirts describes the outer edge of a city or town, farthest from the center but still technically part of that place. If you had a city map, you could draw a line on all sides where crowded streets filled with apartment buildings and businesses begin to give way to single-family houses and country roads. You might not get a perfect circle but you will see that outskirts are those border places between the city and the little towns that surround it.
Vocabulary lists containing outskirts
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
"Outskirts Press apologizes to the families of the victims for any additional heartache this may have caused," the statement said.
From US News • Feb. 23, 2016
Outskirts Press, which published the book, issued a statement saying it had asked Amazon to remove the book from its website.
From US News • Feb. 23, 2016
"Out on the Outskirts of Town," a drama by William Inge starring Anne Bancroft and Jack Warden.
From Time Magazine Archive
And always there was time to write his own songs: Partnership Woman, House Rent Stomp, Outskirts of Town.
From Time Magazine Archive
Outskirts of London were being traversed; but neither driving sheets of rain against which human vision failed, nor the chance of encountering belated traffic, worked any slackening of the pace.
From Red Masquerade by Vance, Louis Joseph
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
