Penturbia
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 Small towns that lie beyond city suburbs, viewed collectively. uncountable
"The exodus to penturbia will be the fifth (“pent” comes from the Greek word for five) great migration since the Revolutionary War, Lessinger says. The first came between 1760 and 1789 when vast numbers of folks left the more established colonies—Virginia, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania—for the unrefined open spaces of places such as North Carolina, Vermont, New Hampshire. Economic depression fostered the second migration (1817-1846), when Americans pushed west. In the late 19th Century the great industrial cities, Chicago in particular, grew and attracted people from the countryside. Then they left. Lessinger dates the fourth great migration—the one to the suburbs—from 1929 to 1958."
Example
More examples"The exodus to penturbia will be the fifth (“pent” comes from the Greek word for five) great migration since the Revolutionary War, Lessinger says. The first came between 1760 and 1789 when vast numbers of folks left the more established colonies—Virginia, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania—for the unrefined open spaces of places such as North Carolina, Vermont, New Hampshire. Economic depression fostered the second migration (1817-1846), when Americans pushed west. In the late 19th Century the great industrial cities, Chicago in particular, grew and attracted people from the countryside. Then they left. Lessinger dates the fourth great migration—the one to the suburbs—from 1929 to 1958."
Etymology
From pent- + suburbia, coined by Jack Lessinger in 1987 to refer to the fifth American migration.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.