Word.ws English Dictionary

urbacity

urbacity noun: an extreme or exaggerated pride in one's city; an insular view of one's city.

Noun

urbacity (uncountable)

  1. (rare) An extreme or exaggerated pride in one's city; an insular view of one's city.
    • The Englishman has quite justly been accused of insularity. That in itself is bad, but there is a compound insularity for which no word of English exists, because the state of mind is not realised. It is the citified insularity of London, London’s “urbacity.” I had to coin a word for it.1909, P.A. Vaile, “A new scheme for imperial scholarships”, in The Fortnightly Review, volume 92, page 724
    • England has suffered cruelly because she would not think, because she was case-armoured in her insular conceit and the urbacity of her politicians. Insularity would be a term too complimentary and too all-embracing to use of them1918, The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art, volume 125, page 388

Examples of urbacity in a sentence

  • Urbacity is a disease that attacks dwellers in cities and causes them to imagine that the world is like New York or Kankakee or Gopher Prairie or wherever they happen to live.1922, Marketing/Communications, volume 118, page 139:
  • It’s raining on Melbourne / on another design concept / made to reassure the citizens / of that city that god-given urbacity / will protect them forever / within a Florentine fantasy.2008, Stephen Oliver, “It’s Raining”, in Harmonic, page 64:

Origin of urbacity

Unknown, but claimed to be a coinage of Percy Adolphus Vaile in the early 20th century (see quote below). Compare urban, -ity, city. Not to be confused with urbanity.

Questions about urbacity

What does urbacity mean?
Urbacity means an extreme or exaggerated pride in one's city; an insular view of one's city.
How do you use urbacity in a sentence?
Urbacity is a disease that attacks dwellers in cities and causes them to imagine that the world is like New York or Kankakee or Gopher Prairie or wherever they happen to live.
What part of speech is urbacity?
Urbacity is a noun.

Words near urbacity in the dictionary

  1. Urayasu
  2. Urbach
  3. Urbach-Wiethe disease
  4. Urbaches
  5. Urbachs
  6. urbacity
  7. Urbaez
  8. Urbaezes
  9. urbainite
  10. urban
  11. urban blight

Source and license

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