outskirts
/ˈaʊtskɝts/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.56 in modern English
13
Scrabble Score
9
Letters
2
Syllables
7
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
The area surrounding a city or town; suburb.
Example Sentences
- "He lived on the outskirts of Paris for a time."
- "The village borders on the Hakka district of Wanluan on the southeastern outskirts of Chaozhou, and its temple is modest in size, with a front and rear chamber and two larger temporary extensions front and side. Yet its members (unaware of similarly named temples in Pingdong as well as Donggang) insist that it is the City God of the county of Pingdong."
- "There are faculty advisers on El’s theater crew who balk at using “they” for one person; classmates at El’s public school on the outskirts of Boston who insist El can’t be “multiple people”; and commenters on El’s social media feeds who dismiss nonbinary gender identities like androgyne (a combination of masculine and feminine), agender (the absence of gender) and gender-fluid (moving between genders) as lacking a basis in biology."
- "More than 100 men, wearing white T-shirts and wielding sticks and clubs, stormed the station in Yuen Long, on Hong Kong’s northwestern outskirts, and assaulted people, including passengers on a subway car."
- "Viktor is monitoring the brigade’s area of responsibility by watching a livestream from a drone flying somewhere over the outskirts of Kostyantynivka on his smartphone."
Etymology
Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *úd Proto-Germanic *ūt Proto-Germanic *ūt- Old English ūt- Middle English ut- English out- English skirts English outskirts From out- + skirts.
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˈaʊtskɝts/
- British English: /ˈaʊtskɜːts/
Subject
Wiktionary places this term in Places.