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.
The first, Aquarius IV, is a tiny galaxy located in the distant outskirts of the Milky Way, approximately 355,000 light-years from Earth.
From Science Daily ● Nov. 7, 2026
Fialho herself lives just on the outskirts of West Hollywood, and she said that — as a bisexual woman who has been in various relationship structures — the registry option helps her “feel protected.”
From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 4, 2026
Because the Design District has no residences and is mostly retail, the census data relies only on residential data from the outskirts of the tract.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 2, 2026
BBC Panorama follows a grieving mother, Samira, who takes on the regime after her teenage daughter, Sevda, was shot dead while protesting on the outskirts of Tehran.
From BBC ● Nov. 2, 2026
He arrives in Dresden on September 28, and spends the day wandering the outskirts of the city, wondering where the circus might set up.
From "The Night Circus" by Erin Morgenstern
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Get a wordDefinitions 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.
