Word.ws English Dictionary

penturbia

penturbia noun: small towns that lie beyond city suburbs, viewed collectively.

Noun

penturbia (uncountable)

  1. Small towns that lie beyond city suburbs, viewed collectively.
    • The exodus to penturbia will be the fifth (“pent” comes from the Greek word for five) great migration since the Revolutionary War, Lessinger says. The first came between 1760 and 1789 when vast numbers of folks left the more established colonies—Virginia, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania—for the...1987 August 20, Jim Spencer, “The land beyond the land beyond”, in Chicago Tribune
    • Penturbia is the ideal territory for "caring conservers": people who reject mass consumption values and save and guard their resources.1990, Michael Marien, Lane Jennings, Future Survey Annual 1988-1989, →ISBN

Examples of penturbia in a sentence

  • The exodus to penturbia will be the fifth (“pent” comes from the Greek word for five) great migration since the Revolutionary War, Lessinger says.1987 August 20, Jim Spencer, “The land beyond the land beyond”, in Chicago Tribune:
  • During this migration, we will return to smaller towns, called penturbia, and to more remote suburbs, called the exurbs.1999, Harry S. Dent, The Roaring 2000'S: Building the Wealth and Lifestyle You Desire in the Greatest Boom in History, →ISBN:
  • Community type is also a segmentation variable and includes urban environments, suburbs, exurbs (remote suburbs), and penturbia (small towns).2014, Frank Kardes, Maria Cronley, Thomas Cline, Consumer Behavior, →ISBN, page 48:

Origin of penturbia

From pent- + suburbia, coined by Jack Lessinger in 1987 to refer to the fifth American migration.

Words formed from penturbia

Questions about penturbia

What does penturbia mean?
Penturbia means small towns that lie beyond city suburbs, viewed collectively.
How do you use penturbia in a sentence?
The exodus to penturbia will be the fifth (“pent” comes from the Greek word for five) great migration since the Revolutionary War, Lessinger says.
What part of speech is penturbia?
Penturbia is a noun.

Words near penturbia in the dictionary

  1. pentuplets
  2. pentuplicate
  3. pentuplicates
  4. pentupling
  5. penturban
  6. penturbia
  7. penty
  8. pentyl
  9. pentylamine
  10. pentylamines
  11. pentylenetetrazol

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: penturbia (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: “penturbia.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/penturbia. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.