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.
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
Some 717 families were relocated to Savda Ghevra, a colony nearly 31 miles away, on the city's outskirts.
From BBC ● Nov. 3, 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
They instead authorized a route along the city’s eastern and southern outskirts, which unions agreed to follow after losing a court challenge.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 24, 2026
So it wasn’t surprising that she felt more at home riding the Metro to the outskirts of Paris.
From "City Spies" by James Ponti
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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.
