I am aware that there is no much agreement. I am not asking about legal definitions but rather what they connote to you. I am also aware that there are liminal cases which are difficult to classify.
So, what do settlement terms connote to you? If no settlement term was provided to you and you had to explain to a third party if some place is a hamlet, village, town, city or some other settlement type, what cues would you use? Where would the delineating lines be?
I imagine this is going to vary from country to country.
From my UK perspective…
A hamlet is a small pocket of houses, perhaps no more than 10-20 households, with no local amenities other than maybe a pub, if you’re lucky. Rural.
A village could be anywhere from a hundred people to a few thousand, with some local amenities (even if it’s just a village shop, a post office and a pub). Could be rural or could be a village which has merged with surrounding villages to form what looks like a city - London, for example, is often described as a city of villages.
A town numbers its residents in the several 1000s - probably anything from 10k-100k, with a full range of amenities (doctors, schools, shops for all needs) and some local industry/employment.
In the UK, a city was traditionally defined as somewhere which had a designated cathedral. That definition isn’t necessarily used anymore for newer cities, but places that are called cities are don so officially (eg not long ago Brighton’s definition was changed from a town to a city). I’m not sure who decides. But a city is probably 100,000 population and above, and is officially designated as a city. Although traditional cathedral cities are cities regardless of population size - our smallest designated city is St David’s in Wales, population 2,000. It has a cathedral because St David is the patron saint of Wales and is believed to be buried there.
Locally we don’t have hamlets or villages.
So a town ranges from a few dozen people or so to 5-10,000 or so and a city is above that.
Size.
I think that, by the standards of the time when their cathedral was built, all cathedral cities would have been particularly large settlements, and, generally speaking, the largest settlement in their area. That is why the cathedral was built there. A few of these cities have probably shrunk since then, but the main reason that many of them now seem relatively small is that other places without cathedrals (actually I think it has to be an Anglican cathedral to automatically confer city status) have grown much more quickly over the centuries.
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So far as I can tell, Americans rarely use the word “village” and most American settlements that, in Britain, would, by size, be classified as villages, are called “small towns”; thus, when Americans talk about “small town values” etc. (as they do rather a lot) they are really discussing what, to a Brit, would be village (or countryside) values and mores. On the other hand, “city”, in America, can have more to do with administrative status than size. I have visited the “city” (so it is signposted) of Harmony, in California, population (as the sign also said) nineteen.
Towns in the UK have a mayor and a town council (I think). The smallest town in England is just down the road from me. Fordwich. With a population of almost 400.
I think it used to be that a village has a church, a town has a marketplace and a city has a cathedral or more than 100,000 citizens.
English-speaking South African. On reflection I think I differentiate between settlement types based on the facilities available, not the population. In sparsely-populated areas of the country there are places with quite small populations that I would count as towns, because they service a huge agricultural district.
A hamlet is just a bunch of houses on the side of the road. It might have a small shop, but no facilities besides that.
A village is a larger cluster of houses; it might have a shop, a community centre, a primary school or a church - at least one of those things, but probably not all of them.
A town is a place that has a police station, a bank branch, a supermarket (or equivalent separate shops - grocer, butcher, baker, etc.), a high school, and probably a government office of some type.
A city is a place that has everything a town does, plus things like an airport with scheduled passenger service, a university, a high court division, hospitals with specialist surgeons - not to say that every city must have all of those things, or that a town can’t have any of them.
Are villages associated with having a medical clinic or doctor’s office i.e.: a medical facility short of a hospital?
SanVito mentions doctors (in the plural) and a full range of amenities but is it common for villages to have just 1-2 nurses or general practitioner physicians or is that more associated with a town?
Most of the major towns and cities of Thailand are either District seats or Provincial capitals. Each District has one public-funded hospital; each Province has (at least) one public university.
Sometimes a District is promoted to Province, i.e. an existing Province is split in two. This might be done as a political reward for that District’s leader(s) with a major disadvantage being the “need” to fund a new University. :smack:
What do mean by this? That your local language has no word for a settlement with a population less than maybe 300 or 400 – that you have to use the same word for this, AND for anything else smaller than a “city”?
Villages vary in size, so the smallest might just have a small shop/post office, a pub, a community centre, a church and maybe a small village school. Not necessarily any GPs. But some villages would have.
Note that we are a small, densely populated island. So if one village doesn’t have a shop or a GP, the next town probably would, and it would probably be only 2-5 miles away. For this reason, many villages which used to have shops and a school (when people had to walk everywhere) often don’t anymore.
In Malay, the closest equivalent to the English word “village” is kampung. However, besides “population” (under 500 or so) and “services” (just a couple of small stores, maybe a primary school at most), there is also a connotation of “low economic development.” (I think there’s also an implication of “ethnically Malay, not Chinese nor Indian”).
When my Malaysian English-speaking wife visited the place where I grew up – a legally-defined village in New York State – she protested “This isn’t a village! People live in nice houses here!”.
I have a similar problem to JKelly’s wife, in that the names of “township categories” in Spanish (more specifically in Spain, and again my corner of the country doesn’t always follow the same conventions as other areas) don’t exactly correspond to the English names; it took my 10th grade geography class almost a whole hour to understand that “there are ‘place’ classification systems where the main determinant is size”, because we’re so used to a system where function and history are more important.
I tend to think of hamlets as being slightly bigger than aldeas (which would be along the lines of “tiny location with more than one family - note that several households but one family does not qualify for aldea”), villages can be from a similar size to a Navarrese pueblo in the UK to much smaller in some US locations, towns bigger than that (and again, may vary a lot not just by country but by area within the country) and cities don’t just have a bigger size but a lot more economic and cultural importance.
Often the translations given are hamlet as aldea, village as pueblo or villa, town and city both as ciudad, and then you have a lot more names to toss in, which again vary by location within any given language. This alone I think gives an idea of how the concepts don’t quite match.
Interesting, Nava. In my experience in Mexico and Central America, pueblo can be a more general term for anything smaller than a city (“where are you from?” “A pueblo called X”), or sometimes a more specific term meaning “between about 500 and 10,000 population” – a smaller place being an aldea. Thus, many English speakers would translate pueblo as ‘town’ (but sometimes ‘village’), and aldea as ‘village’ (but sometimes ‘hamlet’ – although in parts of Mexico, a mere group of a few houses would be called a rancho).
They are not differentiated by any other than relativistic criteria. However, according to the municipality acts of some jurisdictions, a city or a town might be a place that has met some statutory minimum, entitling it to a degree of self-government. Population is not necessarily a factor in such a determination.
There are some populated places in the USA what do not have any legal status at all, and are simply locally-named portions of counties (Metairie, LA, or Paradise NV, for example), but have a large enough population that they could be the largestl city in some states. The US Census Bureau simply lists them as a “Census-designated place”…
In general terms, from smallest settlement to largest, the order goes: hamlet < village < town < city.
A “hamlet” is a small unorganized community in a rural area, usually no more than a cluster of buildings.
“Village” has connotations of 18th Century New England, and in theory it would be larger than a hamlet, and probably incorporated. In practice, it’s usually a small, pretentious suburb 
To my mind, “town” has connotations of the Wild West, and is basically the western version of a village.
We don’t have “towns” around here, but we have townships. A township is a 6 mile x 6 mile square section of a county. Cities usually annex land from the surrounding township(s), and in some cases only little bits & pieces of the original township are left over after the surrounding cities have taken what they want. (In Michigan, Royal Oak Township and Lansing Township are like this.) Some townships have decided to incorporate themselves as cities. Again in Michigan, the suburbs of Livonia & Troy are full 6x6 mile former townships.
“City” implies a built up, urban area.
True, but I think one underlying idea about what distinguishes a “village” from larger concepts is that, in a village, everyone knows everyone else. That’s not a hard-and-fast rule, but it is implied by how the words is often used.
An anthropologist, Robin Dunbar, asserted in a 1998 paper that 150 is about the maximum population among which one person can maintain stable social relationships. If those 150 live in the same place, that’s one way to define a village. (If they “live” on the Straight Dope, that works in its own way as well).
I’m afraid my misspent youth comes into play, and I immediately think:
hamlet: pop <100, only 5% chance of significant NPC hirelings
village: pop < 1000, 25% chance of 1d4 significant NPCs hirelings
etc…
and it may take a village to raise a town, but it takes a city (pop 25000+, 6d100 significant hirelings) to raise a sage (1d6 occurring).
In New York, they represent different government entities.
Hamlet - Shakespearean play
Village - has an idiot
Town - has more than one, but less than 10 idiots
City - 10 or more idiots, generally has tall buildings