oppidan
oppidan adjective: of or pertaining to a town or conurbation.
Adjective
oppidan (not comparable)
- Of or pertaining to a town or conurbation.
- ... calculating the portions of the population, which are purely oppidan, suburban and rural, separately, ...1843, George Calvert Holland, The Vital Statistics of Sheffield, page 106
- In terms of socio-economic impact, it appears that the water mill was an oppidan development in the Roman possessions, including Dacia.1982, Ion Miclea, Corneliu Bucur, An Ages-old Civilization
Noun
oppidan (plural oppidans)
- A town dweller.
- But money is all-potent, and wealthy oppidans soon found means to elbow the aristocracy in their choicest assemblies.1856, John Wade, England's Greatness, page 496
- A class of student in traditional English public schools such as Eton; opposed to colleger or King's Scholar.
- ... might conceivably imply that he did not live, as the custom had been for such boys, in the Abbot's own house, but lodged in the town of Winchester and perhaps attended the College as an oppidan, or townsman.1983, Bridget Boland, Muriel St. Clare Byrne, The Lisle Letters, →ISBN, page 96
Forms of oppidan
| plural | oppidans |
|---|
Origin of oppidan
From Latin oppidānus (“of a town, provincial”), from oppidum (“town which is not an urbs”) + -ānus (“-an”, adjective-forming suffix), by surface analysis, oppid(um) + -an.
Questions about oppidan
- What does oppidan mean?
- Oppidan means of or pertaining to a town or conurbation.
- What part of speech is oppidan?
- Oppidan can be an adjective or a noun.
Words near oppidan in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: oppidan (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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