Meanings
- UKcapitalizedidiomaticsometimesuncountableOn the one hand, the members of the city, borough, or similar community near a university and, on the other hand, the students and faculty of the university itself, especially when understood as rivals in a state of tension or conflict.
Everybody was quiet now, both town and gown; the students were at their dinners and so were the burghers.
1919, Booth Tarkington, chapter 14, in Ramsey Milholland2 more examples
[H]owls, curses, flights of brickbats, stones shivering windows, groans of wounded men, cries of frightened females, cheers of either contending party as it charged the enemy from Carfax to Trumpington Street, proclaimed that the battle was at its height. In Berlin they would have said it was a revolution, and the cuirassiers would have been charging, sabre in hand, amidst that infuriate mob. In France they would have brought down artillery, and played on it with twenty-four pounders. In Cambridge nobody heeded the disturbance—it was a Town and Gown row.
1856, William Makepeace Thackeray, “Codlingsby”, in Burlesques[T]he first archives of this University were burned in the ‘Town and Gown’ riots of 1381 by the Townsmen.
1920, Arthur Quiller-Couch, On The Art of Reading, Lecture V—"On Reading for Examinations"
Cite this entry
town and gown. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 5, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/town%20and%20gown
“town and gown.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/town%20and%20gown. Accessed November 5, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “town and gown,” accessed November 5, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/town%20and%20gown.
Source: town and gown on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.