Skip to content
OneKitly

metropolitan

nounadjectiveattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//mɛtɹəˈpɒlɪtən//
  • United Kingdom/[-tn̩]/
  • United States//ˌmɛtɹəˈpɑlɪtən//
  • United States/[-ɾən]/
  • United States/[-ɾn̩]/

A bishop empowered to oversee other bishops; an archbishop.

noun

  1. 1

    A bishop empowered to oversee other bishops; an archbishop.

    I knovv God by Miracle can inſtruct Kings, as he rained Mannah, and raiſed the Apoſtles from letterless Fiſher-men, to learned Metropolitans, and profound Doctours.

    She was in love with all the new royal princes and princesses, who entered into family relationship with the imperial family; she had been in love with a metropolitan, with a vicar, and with a priest.

    Yet from the late thirteenth century the metropolitan based himself either in Moscow or Vladimir-on-the-Kliazma, which was also in Muscovite territory, and it became the ambition of the Muscovites to make this arrangement permanent.

  2. 2

    The inhabitant of a metropolis.

Etymology

From Late Latin metropolitanus, from Ancient Greek μητροπολίτης (mētropolítēs).

adjective

  1. 1

    Pertaining to the see or province of a metropolitan.

  2. 2

    Of, or pertaining to, a metropolis or other large urban settlement.

    But the one [letter] in the unknown script and with a metropolitan post mark—could it be from some London Woman? In spite of having lived in the country all her life and for the most part in remote Devon, Miss Tilehurst had always understood that such beings really existed.

  3. 3

    Of or pertaining to the parent state of a colony or territory, or the home country, e.g. metropolitan France

    Policies relating to the elimination of racial discrimination which obtain in metropolitan New Zealand are applicable in the Tokelau Islands.

    the new political status of these islands marks a definite break with the traditional Dutch colonial practice to keep its Caribbean colonies at a distance; and, after 2010, Dutch metropolitan laws and dministrative practices started being implemented on the islands.

Forms

plural
metropolitans
comparative
more metropolitan
superlative
most metropolitan
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).