municipality
Americannoun
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municipalities
plural
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a city, town, or other district possessing corporate existence and usually its own local government.
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a community under municipal jurisdiction.
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the governing body of such a district or community.
noun
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a city, town, or district enjoying some degree of local self-government
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the governing body of such a unit
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of municipality
From the French word municipalité, dating back to 1780–90. See municipal, -ity
Explanation
If you live in a town or city that has a mayor or other officials who govern it, you live in a municipality. The word municipality comes from the Latin municipium, meaning "free city." A municipality has its own government, but sometimes municipalities join together to share services. For instance, two neighboring municipalities might decide to share a single recycling center in order to cut costs.
Vocabulary lists containing municipality
Just Mercy
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Inherit the Wind
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A Clockwork Orange
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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.
See Examples For:
Vallejo had been the first California municipality to adopt binding arbitration.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 27, 2026
“We know very well that Batanes is ours,” said Joseph Cultura, the mayor of Itbayat, the island chain’s northernmost municipality.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 9, 2026
Officials in the Avannaata municipality on the island nation’s west coast approved the plan, offering fishers 300 Danish kroner, or about $45, per shark heart.
From Salon ● Oct. 9, 2026
Betrawati straddles flood-devastated Rasuwa and Nuwakot, and is part of the Bidur municipality, where the government estimates more than 3,000 buildings have been damaged or destroyed.
From BBC ● Oct. 6, 2026
Trina Garnett was the youngest of twelve children living in the poorest section of Chester, Pennsylvania, a financially distressed municipality outside of Philadelphia.
From "Just Mercy" by Bryan Stevenson
Smaller lot sizes = more homes: About 90% of municipalities impose minimum lot sizes on zoned lots, write Tobias Peter and Edward Pinto of the American Enterprise Institute.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 29, 2026
HOA fees are also harder to avoid: 44% of homes for sale are now subject to a monthly HOA fee, in part due to builder preferences and a preference for HOAs among some municipalities.
From MarketWatch ● Oct. 19, 2026
Other municipalities, meanwhile, are testing the waters more gradually.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 18, 2026
The spool suit is the latest in a coordinated effort by California’s municipalities and the state attorney general’s office to throttle the bootleg gun industry by stanching the flow of its precursor components.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 10, 2026
It begins with shock, followed by rage—because cruising ahead of her is a water supply truck owned by one of the various underperforming water municipalities.
From "Dry" by Neal Shusterman and Jarrod Shusterman
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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.
