Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner's English Dictionary - town

(towns) Frequency: The word is one of the 700 most common words in English. 1. A town is a place with many streets and buildings, where people live and work. Towns are larger than villages and smaller than cities. Many places that are called towns in Britain would be called cities in the United States. ...Saturday night in the small town of Braintree, Essex... Parking can be tricky in the town centre. N-COUNT • You can use the town to refer to the people of a town. The town takes immense pride in recent achievements. N-COUNT: usu sing 2. You use town in order to refer to the town where you live. He admits he doesn’t even know when his brother is in town... She left town. N-UNCOUNT 3. You use town in order to refer to the central area of a town where most of the shops and offices are. I walked around town... I caught a bus into town. N-UNCOUNT 4. see also ghost town, hometown, new town 5. If you say that someone goes to town on something, you mean that they deal with it with a lot of enthusiasm or intensity. We really went to town on it, turning it into a full, three-day show... PHRASE: V inflects, oft PHR on n 6. If you go out on the town or go for a night on the town, you enjoy yourself by going to a town centre in the evening and spending a long time there visiting several places of entertainment. My idea of luxury used to be going out on the town and coming back in the early hours of the morning... = on the tiles PHRASE: prep PHR, n PHR