towny
towny is the alternative spelling of townie.
Meaning of townie
Noun
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
- 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
- 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
Adjective
towny (comparative townier, superlative towniest)
- Characteristic of a town.
- The cousin might get the farm at Elias's death; but there was no telling. Elias didn't like him. He and his family were too towny for Elias. There was a danger that Elias might put the farm up for public auction, and live his latter days on the price.1947, Lynn Doyle, Green oranges, page 87
Forms of towny
| Noun | |
|---|---|
| plural | townies |
| Adjective | |
| comparative | townier |
| superlative | towniest |
Origin of towny
From town + -y (“person associated”).
From town + -y (adjectival suffix).
Words formed from towny
Questions about towny
- What does towny mean?
- Towny means characteristic of a town.
- What is towny the alternative spelling of?
- Towny is the alternative spelling of townie.
- What part of speech is towny?
- Towny is an adjective.
Words near towny in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: towny (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:
Cite this entry: “towny.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/towny. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.