Metropolitan
/ˌmɛtrəˈpɑlɪtən/noun
A bishop with authority over the other bishops of a province, and more loosely anything belonging to a large city.
The Greek roots
Literally: “of the mother city”
The story of the word
A μητρόπολις was the city that had sent out a colony: Corinth was the mother city of Syracuse, and the relationship carried real obligations in cult and in war. The early church reused the word for the bishop of a provincial capital, a rank the Orthodox churches still use. The civil sense came back through Latin and French, and by 1863 the world's first underground railway was calling itself the Metropolitan, which is why Londoners now shorten the Greek for mother city to the Met.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Late Latin → Old French → English
- First recorded
- 14th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
In a sentence
The metropolitan presided at the consecration of the two new bishops.
Metropolitan rents have pushed the workshops out to the ring road.