Suburban housing development, Spennymoor, Durham, UK, 2015
5 April 2025
The root of all these words is the Latin noun urbs, meaning city, and specifically the city of Rome. From this noun comes the adjective urbanus. And there is the Latin adjective suburbanus, referring to the environs surrounding a city. In Latin, the word’s development followed the usual path, root then root plus affixes.
But in English, we first see the form suburbs. It first appears in a c. 1350 translation of the Deuteronomy 32:32 in the Midland Prose Psalter:
For our God nis nouȝt as her goddes, and our enemis ben iuges. Her uines is of þe uine of Sode-mens & of þe suburbes of Gomorre. Her grape is grape of gall, & her berye hys bitterest.
(For our God is not as their gods, and our enemies are judges. Her vines are the vine of Sodom & of the suburbs of Gomorrah. Their grapes are the grapes of gall, and their berries are the bitterest.)
The Latin Vulgate of this verse uses suburbanis.
This wasn’t the suburbs as we know them today, a ring of residential land surrounding a city. Rather the Latin and fourteenth-century translation of Deuteronomy use the word to mean the agricultural lands surrounding a city.
A few decades later, we seen suburbs used to refer to residential areas outside of a city, but these are not the affluent homesteads which we’re familiar with today. Rather these are shanty towns and low areas populated by the poor and the criminal. Here’s a passage from Chaucer’s Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue, c. 1387, where the Canon’s Yeoman describes where he and his con-man boss reside:
“Ther-of no fors, good Yeman,” quod oure Hoost;
“Syn of the konnyng of thy lord thow woost,
Telle how he dooth, I pray thee hertely,
Syn that he is so crafty and so sly.
Where dwelle ye, if it to telle be?”
“In the suburbes of a toun,” quod he,
“Lurkynge in hernes and in lanes blynde,
Whereas thise robbours and thise theves by kynde
Holden hir pryvee fereful residence,
As they that dar nat shewen hir presence;
So faren we, if I shal seye the sothe.”
(“That does not matter, good Yeoman,” said our host.
“Since you know the cunning of your lord,
Tell how he does, I ask you heartily,
Since he is so crafty and so sly.
Where do you dwell, if it can be told?”
“In the suburbs of a town,” he said,
“Lurking in corners and blind lanes,
Where these robbers and these thieves by nature
Hold their private, fearful residence,
As those who dare not show their presence;
So we conduct ourselves, if I shall tell the truth.”)
The disreputable nature of suburbs would continue into the seventeenth century. It is only in the eighteenth do such regions start to be rehabilitated.
Urban doesn’t make its English appearance until over two hundred years later, in Alexander Garden’s 1619 verse life of William Elphinstone, bishop of Aberdeen (1431–1514):
And suche viuacitie of spreit,
Was he indew'd withall.
That nothing laicking feem’d
That needs concerne, or can
Be fitting for ane priuat, or
A publick placed man.
Vrban and tunishe turns,
Or for the land's effairs,
Or what soeu'r besyd, his wit
Him fit for all declairs.
Note that Garden is associating the city with things that are fashionable (tunishe or tonish), a connotation that continues to this day.
There are further variations on the words. We get the faux-Latin suburbia in the late nineteenth century. Here is an example from a theater review that appears in the London newspaper the Era on 9 October 1870:
A new farce by Mr. Conway Edwardes, entitled Board and Residences, commenced the entertainments. It is a light and bustling affair enough. Miss Matilda Mildew, a spinster of middle age, keeps a boarding-house in Tranquil-terrace, Suburbia.
And the American slangish clipping the burbs is in place by 1977. From an article on urban farming in the Washington Post of 11 December of that year:
Regardless, for most homesteaders, there must be another source of income, and that requires, in the vast majority of cases, close proximity to an urban environment. Some, like General Motors heir Stewart Mott, for several years a chicken-farmer on his Manhattan rooftop, have found ways of adding a rural flavor to an essentially urban existence. Others are buying the American dream of a house in the burbs and two cars in the garage—and then adding a new dimension.
Sources:
Bülbring, Karl D., ed. The Earliest Complete English Prose Psalter, part 1. Early English Text Society. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1891, 188. London, British Library, MS Additional 17376. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Cook, Adrienne. “The Urban: Farmstead.” Washington Post, 11 December 1977, Magazine 25/2. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Garden, Alexander. The Lyf, Doings, and Deathe of The Right Reuerend and Worthy Prelat, William Elphinstoun (1619). In A Theatre of Scottish Worthies. Glasgow: R. Anderson, 1878, 71. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Middle English Dictionary, 8 February 2025, s.v. suburban, n., suburb(e, n.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2002, s.v. ‘burb, n.; June 2012, s.v. suburban, n. & adj., suburb, n., suburbia, n.; June 2011, s.v. urban, adj. & n.
“Town Edition.” Era (London), 9 October 1870, 13/1. Gale Primary Sources: British Library Newspapers.
Image credit: Trevor Littlewood, 2015. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.