No Stupid Questions

We don't understand villages, you don't understand football. We're just different.

NY has towns and villages. A township is way larger than a village. For example the Town of Huntington vs the incorporated Village of Lloyd Harbor within the town. We also have hamlets, like Huntington Village, which are similar but unincorporated.

However, all of this I'd consider suburban, not rural.

“Village” isn’t used anywhere in the USA as far as I know. Places with <500 people call themselves a town usually. Where I’m from in NH (close to these towns), residents call themselves townies. “Small” is kinda just used as a grammatical intensifier in all the cases I’ve heard it used. YMMV in the south or Midwest though.

so by way of examples, going to some extremes...

Kent County, Texas is one of the most rural counties in the US. with Jayton hosting its county court house. As of the 2020 census, the entire county has less than one thousand people. The terms small town/town are somewhat nebulous, But usually in really rural places it’s someplace with a few shops and maybe a neighborhood and school and stuff.

This is a sat photo of Jayton, compliments of google maps:

Jayton has about 500 people.

Note, that the mile is about 1.25 miles/ 2 km's north to south and about the same in east west. (at least, as far the structures/housing goes.) to get an idea of what it looks like there, here's the streetview in front of the court house.

zooming out to kent county, there's like 5 towns in that entire square, note the distance marker down at the bottom being about 8 km:

now, compare that to new york city:

Note, the distance marker at the bottom being about 3 km.

zooming in to roughly the same scale as the photo on jayton.... randomly....

and here's a few courthouses in brooklyn....

and the king's county courthouse on streetview

See "nuance: lack of"

You’re familiar with market towns in the UK? A bit like one of those but with hours and hours of agricultural land all around it. A solitary high street in the middle of nowhere.

N.B. I’m not USian so don’t know what I’m on about…

A village would be an "unincorporated town" in the US, administered under the county. There are a few actual incorporated villages, but they are small towns that just chose to call themselves that.

The main difference is that an incorporated city/town/etc has its own municiple government ... a "village" would still be run by the county.

A lot of this is going to be subjective and depend on your personal frame of reference, as well as local laws and customs that can vary a lot around the country

In general, in normal casual conversation, most Americans are going to refer to a municipality as a "town" unless they're in a big city. Legally, that municipality might be considered a city, town, township, borough, home rule municipality, village, etc. but unless it's a big city we're probably going to refer to it as a town most of the time

There's also, in some areas, unincorporated communities that don't have an actual municipal government, but if there's a relatively dense area, we might go ahead and refer to that area as a town.

Some parts of the US do have some sort of legal definition for "village," in others it might be used informally to refer to a small "quaint" town, or part of the town.

There's also the distinction of, for example, being "in a town" vs "in town" or "downtown"

Most of us who don't live in a big city would say that we live in a town, meaning the municipality we live in. Somewhat less of us live "in town" meaning something more like the denser, more "urban" parts of town, probably resembling what you think of as a village, and "downtown" would refer to something like the area around the main street or main commercial area where you might find stores, restaurants, bars, etc.

So a "rural town" is basically any sort of town in a rural area. I'm not sure if there's any sort of a legal definition for a rural town, but in general I'd say that if a town is surrounded by woods and/or farmland and you can't trace an unbroken path of suburban sprawl from it back to a major city it's rural.

Some of those rural towns can actually be fairly big and urbanized, but they're otherwise in a rural area in their own little bubble so we'd still consider it to be a rural town.

As far as town vs "small town" that's kind of subjective.

The town I grew up in is often referred to as a small town, largely because it's physically pretty small, almost exactly 1 square mile, but that 1 mile is pretty densely populated, I think the population is around 9-10k people currently, it's just a couple miles outside of the nearest major city, and pretty well-urbanized itself, connected to several major highways, was once a big manufacturing town but is now pretty gentrified, with a solid handful of 10+ floor office buildings. People from more rural areas probably wouldn't agree that it's a "small town" but people from a bit city probably would think so, and for those of us "townies" whose families have lived here for a few generations still feel like it has a small town feel, even if the newer transplants don't all share that feeling.

The town I currently live in isn't quite rural, but it's getting there. I'm towards the edge of the suburbs now, maybe even into the exurbs. The town is physically much larger, but only has about half the population. That small, less dense population makes it still feel kind of small-towny.

Also worth noting, my town doesn't really have any sort of a "downtown" area, no real main street to go walking around or anything. We have a few businesses and stores and such roughly clustered in the same area, but it's not a cohesive thing that feels like a "town" or what you might recognize as a "village." I would normally may this, but if I said I was going "into town" for something, most people around me would probably understand that I'm going to one of our neighboring towns that are a bit more built-up

So some combination of physical size, population, population density, and a curtain je ne sais quoi are what makes a town a small town.

In my case it was population 600, 1 paved road through it, no stop lights, 1 or 2 roadside stores, a small k-8 school, and a 2 room post office.

"Town" is generally used to mean "something smaller than a city". I live in a town, and the population is about 30K. It's technically a township, but people don't really use that term widely. I know that doesn't really clear things up, but your real answer is "it's complicated".

Yeah, we don't really use village in the US. A town is anything with a population smaller than about 10,000ish but the exact number will vary with the density and vibe. If you can't drive across the entire population center (where it's roughly broken into blocks) within the span of Freebird by Lynyrd Skynyrd (single version not album version) then it's too big to be a town.

Colloquially, it just means a small municipality. A "rural town" is a small municipality that is not near a larger metro area.

Town has a specific meaning in some states. I'm from Ohio. There is no such legal meaning here. Any municipality over 5k residents is a city. Anything other than that is a village. I am from a city with a population of about 6k. Outside of the city limits is farmland. I would say I'm from a small town/rural area.

I've lived in 20 different cities/towns/villages across five States, and I can tell you that no one really knows how to define these things accurately, at least in common parlance.

Tappahannock VA is absolutely what I'd consider to be a rural town, but when compared to a place like Waterboro ME, it feels positively metropolitan.

I think, in general, a "rural town" is usually understood to be a relatively small, centralized area of mixed-use zoning in typically agricultural regions; a population under 10,000 with a few main streets with things like general stores, a few diners or restaurants, a grocery market, and single-family homes. These places almost always grow around farmland.

A "village" might be something more along the lines of Pleasantville NY or Cornish ME. They don't rely on agriculture and have centralized social dynamics.

There's also, wildly, a difference between "rural towns" and "small towns." Golden CO is not a rural town, even though it shares many of the characteristics of one. It's a "small town."

That being said, people from New York City will often refer to Boston as a "town" so I guess a lot of this is relative.