Word.ws English Dictionary

open cities

open cities is the plural of open city.

Meaning of open city

Noun

open city (plural open cities)

  1. (international law) A city which has announced (during wartime) that it has abandoned all defensive efforts, generally in the event of its imminent capture.
    • “You needn’t worry about bombs, by the way. Dresden is an open city. It is undefended, and contains no war industries or troop concentrations of any importance.”1969 March 31, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five […] (A Seymour Lawrence Book), New York, N.Y.: Delacorte Press, →OCLC, page 127
  2. (dictatorships) A city that (during peacetime) is not heavily restricted regarding ingress and egress because it does not contain militarily sensitive facilities or extensive defense industrial plant.
    Antonyms:
    closed city

Questions about open cities

What is open cities the plural of?
Open cities is the plural of open city.

Words near open cities in the dictionary

  1. open circuit voltage
  2. open circuit voltages
  3. open circuits
  4. open circulatory system
  5. open circulatory systems
  6. open cities
  7. open city
  8. open class
  9. open classroom
  10. open classrooms
  11. open cluster

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: open cities (page history and authors); open city (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: “open cities.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/open_cities. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.