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