What defines the difference between a Village and a Town?

Question

is it land area, population both or something entirely different?

Answer 1

I would say it is the population numbers.that makes the difference.

Answer 2

One is smaller than the other.

Answer 3

If population level is below or in between 1000 and 1500 and agriculture area is sufficient (not essential),it is village.

More populated area is town and large land area.

Answer 4

In the USA, especially in the Northeast, a town (or township) is a legal concept, like a nation, state, county, or city that has the right to pass rules to control behavior, appoint police/patrolmen/deputies, collect taxes to pay for them.

  For most of the country, even the smallest town or village can elect its own council and mayor once incorporated according to state law, so village, town, and city are just a matter of size and style.  Village is supposed to have a homey style - be "quaint" - while town seems a bit more organized and city is bigger.   I grew up in the Village of Lakewood, Illinois, and went to school in the City of Crystal Lake, right next to it and if you type those into an internet search, you will find those are legal titles.

  We did not not develop the pattern of occupancy of villages that England has where the houses are along a road or concentrated at an intersection and the agricultural land extends in long narrow fields that the villagers can reach from the road.  This, I recently read is due to the survey rules the USA used in giving land to veterans where no allowance was made for roads along side property, so people put their houses in the middle of their square of land.

Answer 5

In UK most towns have shopping centers, villages tend to have few services spread around the village

I believe the original difference was a military one - villages with fortifications were called towns

Answer 6

Population, The village my wife grew up in is now a town because of population .....

Answer 7

Town Charter, Town Council and regular market.

A village is distinguished from a town in that:

A village should not have a regular agricultural market, although today such markets are uncommon even in settlements which clearly are towns.

A village does not have a town hall nor a mayor.

There should also be a clear green belt or open fields surrounding its parish borders.

The village should not be under the administrative control of an adjacent town or city.

Answer 8

population

Answer 9

A village has a designated idiot.

Answer 10

Depending on where you are, there are different political or administrative boundaries on what separates a village from a town (and a city).

However, I think the differences between a village and a town lie in the difference in the levels of urbanization, population and economic activity.

Towns are usually populated by more people. They also tend to offer better infrastructure and a larger variety of goods and services. They are better connected by roads and rail, for example, and they have bigger markets, more shops, and essential establishments such as a hospital, a church and fire and police stations.

Villages tend to be more rural than towns (though perhaps not rural per se), and focus more on primary economic activity (like agriculture and farming) because their populations are too small to support a higher level of economic activity.

Towns may be seen as serving as a step up to cities from villages and other rural areas (one of Ravenstein's laws of migration), and so can be said to be of a higher order than villages.

Towns, because they are better connected to other places (other cities, towns or villages), have a larger sphere of influence than a village. That is to say that people from several villages visit the town for goods and services not available in villages, e.g. banks, or as a transport hub, where people may travel from town to town, to another village, or to the city.

(In this sense, a city may be seen as even larger than a town, with a population large enough to support high levels of economic activities such as banking and finance.

A city will have the largest sphere of influence out of the three, offering niche products, like high-end luxury goods, cutting edge digital products etc which are unlikely to be found in lower order settlements like towns and villages.

It is also a higher level transport hub, being even better-connected than a town is to other towns, cities and villages.)

Answer 11

I will take a quess at population, but I could be wrong.

Answer 12

Bit of both but its different to every different person. A village tends to be smalll and a town abit bigger with more shops than 1 or 2 in a village.

Answer 13

Depending on the number of inhabitants, human settlements are usually classified as cities, towns or villages. Cities are generally larger and more densely populated than towns and have industrial, commercial and residential areas. Most cities also perform administrative functions. A town in smaller than a city but larger than village, it has smaller areas as a market, commercial and administrative hubs for the surrounding countryside and villages. Their population is generally smaller than the cities.

Location and history of a place also plays a part in it being designated as a City or a Town.

In densely populated countries like India and China, many towns are larger than the state and national capitals of many sparsely populated countries.Villages are small rural settlements largely dependent on agriculture, tourism or a specialized skill.

village:

A village is a place where people live, normally in the countryside. It is usually larger than a hamlet and smaller than a town or city. In the past, villages were where most people lived. After the Industrial Revolution, when people started making a lot of things in factories, people lived more in towns. Moving to towns is called urbanization.

Villages in the past

There have been many sorts of villages and ways of village life. But usually, villages were small, with only 5 to 30 families. Homes were together, so people were with friends and felt safe. They grew food on the land by the village.

[change] England

In England the biggest difference between a hamlet and a village is that villages have a church. The difference between a village and a town is that the town has a market.

There are a lot of villages which people say are the biggest village in England. Some are Cranleigh in Surrey, Cottingham in the East Riding of Yorkshire, both Haddenham and Wendover in Buckinghamshire, Braunton in Devon, Birchington in Kent, Horsforth in West Yorkshire, Street in Somerset, Bembridge on the Isle of Wight, Ruskington in Lincolnshire and Kidlington in Oxfordshire.

[change] United States

[change] Incorporated villages

In twenty US states, a "village" is a sort of local government, similar to a city but with less power and for a smaller place. But this is not so in all the United States. In many states, there are villages which are bigger than the smallest cities in the state. The difference is not the population, it is how much power the different sorts of places have, and what they do for people living there.

[change] New York state

In New York state, a village is a place which is usually in a town. There are villages which are in more than one town (several examples are in Westchester County). Some villages are in two counties.

[change] Unincorporated villages

In many states, a "village" is only a place where people live, with no legal power, similar to a hamlet in New York state. The name for these is "unincorporated villages".

town:

town is a type of settlement ranging from a few hundred to several thousand (occasionally hundreds of thousands) inhabitants, although it may be applied loosely even to huge metropolitan areas. Usually, a "town" is thought of as larger than a village but smaller than a "city", though there are exceptions to this rule. The words "city" and "village" came into English from Latin via French. "Town" and "borough" (also "burrow", "burgh", "bury", etc.) are of native Germanic origin, from Old English burg, a fortified settlement, and tūn, an enclosed piece of land.[1]

Origin of the word and use around the world

In Old English and Old Scots, "Town" (or "toun", "ton", etc.) originally meant a fortified municipality, whereas a borough was not fortified. But that distinction did not last long, and "Edina Burgh" or "Edinburgh" - modernly called a "city" - was a fortified "town" from its founding.

In modern American English, a town is usually a municipal corporation that is smaller than a city but larger than a village. In some cases, "town" is an alternate name for "city" or "village" (especially a larger village). Sometimes, the word "town" is short for "township." Some US states designate towns and townships as political subdivisions of Counties. In general, towns can be differentiated from townships, villages, or hamlets on the basis of their economic character, in that most of a town's population will tend to derive their living from manufacturing industry, commerce, and public service rather than primary industry such as agriculture or related activities.

A place's population size is not a reliable determinant of urban character. In many areas of the world, as in India at least until recent times, a large village might contain several times as many people as a small town. In the United Kingdom, there are historical cities that are far smaller than the larger towns.

The modern phenomenon of extensive suburban growth, satellite urban development, and migration of city-dwellers to villages have further complicated the definition of towns, creating communities urban in their economic and cultural characteristics but lacking other characteristics of urban localities.

Some forms of non-rural settlement, such as temporary mining locations, may be clearly non-rural, but have at best a questionable claim to be called a town.

The distinction between a town and a city similarly depends on the approach adopted: a city may strictly be an administrative entity which has been granted that designation by law, but in informal usage, the term is also used to denote an urban locality of a particular size or importance: whereas a medieval city may have possessed as few as 10,000 inhabitants, today some consider an urban place of fewer than 100,000 as a town, even though there are many officially designated cities that are very, very much smaller than that.

Answer 14

In this case, SIZE does matter! Come to think of it, size matters in the other thing as well!

Answer 15

location and population and a village is governed by trustees and a town by a mayor..