bedroom community
4
4.4
- noun
- /ˈbɛdruːm kəˈmjunɪti/
- US
:
comunidad dormitorio
- Morrisville, PA is the bedroom community of Mercer County, NJ.
- burgeoning bedroom community
Examples
-
Trinity was located in the heart of a bedroom community on the other side of the state line separating Missouri from Kansas.
Fiction book (2001) -
Loudoun is a sleepy bedroom community that is on the verge of waking up!
Blog text (34) -
It's more a suburban bedroom community.
-
You can see this in the older suburban bedroom communities.
Blog text (28) -
Scott James, and thousands like him in Cleveland's bedroom communities, bought into the Obama line.
Blog text (8) -
The major highway (Route 95) near Ashland makes it more of a bedroom community than my town seems, though.
Blog text (31) -
Economically speaking, Tacoma is a bedroom community of Seattle and the East Side, as is Everett.
Blog text (19) -
Its county seat, Monticello, is an up-and-coming "bedroom community" of Tallahassee.
Academic text (2017) -
In the 1970s, when I-95 was built, Exeter evolved into an affluent bedroom community of Providence.
Blog text (1) -
Many families prefer to live in a bedroom community that offers a peaceful environment while still being close to the city.
How Residential
Surface Forms
Morphology
bedroom + community
The compound combines 'bedroom' (a private sleeping room) and 'community' (a group of people living together), so a B1 learner who knows both constituents can readily infer it refers to a residential area rather than a commercial one. However, the specific nuance that most residents commute to a nearby city (i.e. a commuter town) is a lexicalized, culturally specific extension not fully predictable from the parts, so it is not fully transparent.
Etymology
Bedroom community comes from the image of a place where people only use their houses to 'sleep' at night. They travel to a nearby city to work each day, so the term means a residential area where most people live but work elsewhere.