urbane [M16th] This word was first used in the sense ‘urban’; it comes from Latin urbanus ‘belonging to the city’, from urbs ‘city’, the source of urban [E17th] and conurbation [E20th]. Suburban appears in the late 16th century used literally for ‘relating to a suburb’ (an LME word meaning ‘outside the city’). The disparaging sense appears in 1789, a sense summed up in 1817 with Byron’s ‘vulgar, dowdyish, and suburban’.