Advertisement

Advertisement

town and gown

  1. In a college town, the relations between “town and gown” are those between the residents of the town and the students and faculty associated with the school, who in the past wore academic gowns. Such relations are often not friendly or pleasant.


Discover More

Idioms and Phrases

The inhabitants of a college or university town and the students and personnel of the college, as in There used to be friction between town and gown but the new parking lots have eased it . The gown in this expression alludes to the academic robes traditional in British universities. [Early 1800s]
Discover More

Example Sentences

These town-and-gown fights were often attended by fatal results.

At Exeter College another town-and-gown fight was raging furiously.

There had been no town-and-gown feeling existing similar to what prevailed in places of greater pretensions.

The town-and-gown riots took the place of sports, that's all.

Advertisement

Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023

Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

Advertisement

Advertisement

Advertisement


towntown car