Word.ws English Dictionary

city mouse

city mouse noun: a city person; someone who has city ways.

Noun

city mouse (plural city mice)

  1. (figuratively) A city person; someone who has city ways.
  2. (figuratively, slang, Antarctica) A member of support personnel who remains at the base.
    • […] before arriving, he'd never thought it would be spent as one of the city mice. Most of the McMurdoans never ranged more than walking distance from the largest town on the entire continent.2021, M. L. Buchman, In for the Long Haul: An Antarctic Ice Fliers Romance Story
    • "[…] Maybe we'll run into some country mice."
      "Country mice?"
      "Some of the Mac-Town folks, out here on the ice. City mice stay at McMurdo, and country mice—"2023, J. Scott Coatsworth, Love & Limitations

Forms of city mouse

pluralcity mice

Origin of city mouse

An allusion to The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse, one of Aesop's Fables.

Questions about city mouse

What does city mouse mean?
City mouse means a city person; someone who has city ways.
What part of speech is city mouse?
City mouse is a noun.
What is the plural of city mouse?
The plural of city mouse is city mice.

Words near city mouse in the dictionary

  1. city limit
  2. city limits
  3. city manager
  4. city managers
  5. city mice
  6. city mouse
  7. City of a Thousand Minarets
  8. City of Angels
  9. City of Brotherly Love
  10. City of Brussels
  11. City of Churches

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: city mouse (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “city mouse.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/city_mouse. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.