Word of the Day: CONURBATION

conurbation (noun) - an extended aggregation, merging, or network of towns, cities, or urban communities; a continuous urban or industrial sprawl [kon-er-bey-shuhn]

BREAKDOWN: CON- (with) + URB- (city) + -ATION (process of)

"At the beginning of the 1980s, Guangzhou was a medium-sized port city surrounded by rice paddies and fishing villages, not much bigger than Liverpool; today it’s just one fragment of the Guangzhou-Shenzhen-Zuhai-Foshan-Dongguan-Zhongshan-Jiangmen-Huizhou-Zhaoqing-Hong Kong-Macau gigacity, a rash of nearly contiguous high-density cyberpunk sprawl that’s broken out across the region, larger than the average European country, home to nearly seventy million people: easily the biggest conurbation on the planet." —Sam Kriss