Gotham
name ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 Nickname for New York City: a major city in New York, United States.
"This passage of the erudite Linkum was applied to the city of Gotham, of which he was once Lord Mayor, as appears by his picture hung up in the hall of that ancient city;—but his observation fits this best of all possible cities "to a hair." It is a melancholy truth that this same New-York, though the most charming, pleasant, polished, and praise-worthy city under the sun, and in a word the bonne bouche of the universe, is most shockingly ill-natured, and sarcastic, and wickedly given to all manner of backslidings; for which we are very sorry, indeed."
- 2 A village and civil parish in Rushcliffe borough, Nottinghamshire, England, associated in folklore with insanity (OS grid ref SK5330).
- 3 Ellipsis of Gotham City: a fictional city serving as the primary setting for the Batman franchise. abbreviation, alt-of, ellipsis
Example
More examples"There are no more than two villains in Gotham."
Etymology
“Homestead where goats are kept”, from Old English gāt (“goat”) + hām (“home”). * (New York City nickname): First used 1807 by Washington Irving in his Salmagundi Papers: see the quotation. The original pronunciation had /th/ with later loss of /h/. The pronunciation with /θ/ is a spelling pronunciation that arose from a misreading of th as a digraph.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.