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say it: DOWN-town
downtown is a noun, adjective and adverb meaning "the central area or commercial center of a town or city". It carries 3 recorded senses.
the central area or commercial center of a town or city
“the heart of Birmingham's downtown”
of or located in the lower part of a town, or in the business center
“downtown Manhattan”
“delinquents roaming the downtown streets”
toward or in the lower or central part of town
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for downtown come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.