townie
/ˈtaʊni/
townie noun: a person living in a university area who is not associated with the university. Also the diminutive of town.
Noun (1)
townie (plural townies)
- A person living in a university area who is not associated with the university.
- Professional gamblers have a cushy racket in college football because old grads and even townies of college localities are sentimental bettors and easy to separate from their money.1947 November, “College football business”, in Kiplinger Magazine, page 36
- School is an ivory tower on the hill; it nestles in the gated groves of academe. It’s residents do not mix with “townies.”1994, Terry O'Banion, A Learning College for the 21st Century, page 11
- A person who has moved from a town or city to a rural area. Especially, one who is perceived not to have adopted rural ways.
- [Hamlet] was only repeating the phrase of an ordinary English rustic when jeering at a “townie”—whom he suspected of being a gutter-snipe—that “He don’t know a hawk from a hernshaw”.1914 June 6, Roper Lethbridge, “Village Words”, in The Saturday Review, page 737
- From being a born-and-bred townie from north London, to a 36-year-old part-time farmer and full-time businessman is no mean achievement.1998, Ken Ashton, “Preface”, in Graham Irwin, A Farm of Our Own, page 8
- A person familiar with the town (urbanised centre of a city) and with going out on the town; a street-wise person.
- A chav.
- Synonyms:
- synonyms at chav
- A working-class citizen in a metropolitan area.
- A person who lives in a city or town, or has an urban outlook.
- Bobby Wick stormed through the tents of his Company, rallying, rebuking, mildly, as is consistent with the Regulations, chaffing the faint-hearted [...] comforting the panic-stricken with rude speech, and more than once tending the dying who had no friends — the men without "townies"[.]1889, Rudyard Kipling, “Only A Subaltern”, in Under the Deodars, Boston: The Greenock Press, published 1899, page 148
- Here I parted with my fellow-townies, whose home shed at Millhouses covers fields where I played as a child.1949 March and April, F. G. Roe, “I Saw Three Englands–2”, in Railway Magazine, page 83
- A person from Stornoway.
Noun (2) capitalized: Townie
Townie (plural Townies)
- A person from Charlestown, Massachusetts, (especially) a working-class person of Irish American heritage.
- Racial isolation is so strong that in the early 1970s there were only 388 blacks among the 38,488 residents of South Boston, and only 76 among the 15,353 “Townies” of Charlestown.1981, Laurence R. Marcus, Benjamin D. Stickney, Race and Education: The Unending Controversy, page 110
- By fall 1974, however, new impulses broke through and on September 25, three hundred Townies organized the Charlestown branch of ROAR2004, Ronald P. Formisano, Boston Against Bussing, page 123
Also used as
townie is also the diminutive of town.
Examples of townie in a sentence
- In Spike Lee's movie School Daze you play a townie who's very hostile to the college students from out of town.2004, Terry Gross, All I Did Was Ask, page 336:
- The term cockney originally meant cock’s egg or misshapen egg such as a young hen might lay, in other words a lily-livered townie as opposed to a strong countryman.2003, Rob Humphreys, The Rough Guide to London, page v:
- The modern Aussie is a townie through and through.1999, Richard D. Lewis, When Cultures Collide: Managing Successfully Across Cultures, page 191:
- In the 1940′s, a social survey of Victorian country towns found a similar gap between the interests and outlooks of farmers and townies, and an underlying fear on the part of the townsfolk.2002, Graeme Davison, “Rural Sustainability in Historical Perspective”, in Chris Cocklin, Jacqui Dibden, editors, Sustainability and Change...
Synonyms of townie
- synonyms at chav
- townlet
Antonyms
- maw
- cocky ()
Forms of townie
| plural | townies |
|---|---|
| plural | Townies |
| alternative form (dated) | townee |
Origin of townie
From town + -ie (“person associated”).
From town + -ie (diminutive suffix).
From (Charles)town + -ie.
Words that rhyme with townie
Questions about townie
- What does townie mean?
- Townie means a person living in a university area who is not associated with the university.
- How do you use townie in a sentence?
- In Spike Lee's movie School Daze you play a townie who's very hostile to the college students from out of town.
- What part of speech is townie?
- Townie is a noun.
- How do you pronounce townie?
- Townie is pronounced /ˈtaʊni/.
- What is the plural of townie?
- The plural of townie is townies.
Words near townie in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: townie (page history and authors); Townie (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.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-townie.ogg.
Cite this entry: “townie.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/townie. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.