Pronounced: zy-MOLL-uh-jee, noun
Notes: People in certain professions or with certain hobbies will know this word (I didn’t)
Yesterday’s word
The word conurbation is “an aggregation or continuous network of urban communities”
First usage
Our word came into English in the 1910s
Background / Comments
When I saw the definition, I thought it was a fancy word for what used to be called “urban sprawl”, but they have sufficiently different meanings that they don’t appear to be synonyms of each other. The phrase “urban sprawl” indicates unplanned growth of a city, whereas our word means cities that have grown together and yet retain their identity (such as Scottsdale, Tempe, and Pheonix). Our word was coined by Sir Patrick Geddes in his book Cities in Evolution. Our word was constructed from the Latin prefix con- (together) with the Latin noun urbs (city) and the English noun suffix -ation.
Richard's Vocabulary Word-of-the-Day 