Politics & SocietyGreek → English
Metropolis
/məˈtrɒpəlɪs/noun
A very large city, usually the main city of a country or region.
The Greek roots
μήτηρ
mḗtēr
mother
πόλις
pólis
city, city-state
Literally: “mother city”
The story of the word
A metropolis was a mother-city: the town that sent settlers out and kept ritual and political ties with what they founded, as Corinth did with Syracuse. The church then used it for the seat of a metropolitan bishop with lesser sees under him. English flattened it to mean simply a huge city, which is how Fritz Lang could hang it on his 1927 film about a city with no mother anywhere in sight.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Late Latin → English
- First recorded
- 1530s
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
metropolitanacropolisnecropoliscosmopolitanpolice
In a sentence
Half the country's tax revenue comes out of one metropolis.
He moved from a village of two hundred to a metropolis of nine million and slept badly for a year.