How do I know if a place is a city or a town or a village?

In British English we can distinguish between a city, a town, a village or a hamlet using a historical perspective.

Using this generally held historical perspective we can see the following  distinctions between cities, towns, villages and hamlets:

A CITY:

has a cathedral or a university or both *(see below for modern day definitions)

A TOWN:

has a market

A VILLAGE:

doesn’t have a cathedral or a market but it will have a church

A HAMLET:

is very small with only a handful of houses and usually doesn’t have any shops or other services. It would be unusual for it to have a church, but occasionally they do

A historical explanation for these distinctions can be found >>>> here

* In fact the definition of a city has changed over the years.

In 1907 the government decided that for a town to have city status it should have a population of over 300,000 and/or have a significant role in its geographical region. This has been adjusted a number of times over the last century, towns must apply for city status, they are not awarded it automatically.

This means that some places can have a cathedral but not be a city:

St.James church in Bury St.Edmunds became a cathedral in 1914 when the diocese of St Wednesbury and Ipswich was created. Bury doesn’t comply with the new criteria for city status and, to my knowledge, has never applied for such status.

After the industrial revolution the population of Britain has grown and many industrial towns became larger, and more important, than some historical cities:

An example of an English town that has been awarded city status following the new criteria is Stoke-on-Trent, which does not have a cathedral. It was deemed to be a significantly important town for its role as the centre of the pottery industry in the area. It officially became a city in 1925.

Logically

• there are only a few Cities; cities are usually very big
• more towns ; towns are smaller
• even more villages; villages are even smaller. There are some exceptions.

 St. Davids in Wales is a city because it has a cathedral but it only has a population of around 2,000 (2001). There are many villages that are bigger.

Other countries have also developed a system where a region has a city which is the administrative headquarters  for the region. Sub regional areas have towns that administer this smaller area.

You will find additional interesting information in the comments section below

See the comments about the British/European situation compared with the use of City and Town in the USA.

Millions of native English speakers are testament to this fact. If you are not a native English speaker and do not have regular contact with good English speakers it is difficult to get a good model for communication using English. In this case it is extremely important to get as much contact as possible with the English language through internet, TV, radio, podcasts, books, newspapers, magazines etc.

In addition to this daily contact with “real English” if we want to speak English well , understand English well, write English well it is necessary to find out how to understand English grammar. How we use English verb forms (tenses) is essential to developing good communication in English. Effective use of the English language is the key to good communication.

We are preparing a series of master classes about how we use English grammar correctly. I am not going to talk about how we construct the verb form but I want to give the basic concepts of how these grammatical forms are used by native English speakers. 

Sometimes people try and complicate English grammar. English grammar has evolved over many hundreds of years to become a simplified version of what went before. The basic rules of verb forms (tenses) are very simple, they are perhaps different from your own language but they are not difficult.

After learning and using correctly the basic verb forms then English becomes more complicated because it is difficult to find rules to follow. It is at this stage that it is essential to have regular, daily, contact with the language.

Go to Grammar section: here