Preface To SomethingTown: How Big Is A Town Supposed To Be Anyway?

I am always disappointed when I discover that there aren't clearly defined terms in a hierarchy of growth for something. Let it be said now that the same is true for "towns." As the Wikipedia says, "A town is a type of settlement ranging from a few hundred to several thousand (occasionally hundreds of thousands) inhabitants, although it may be applied loosely even to huge metropolitan areas; the precise meaning varies between countries & is not always a matter of legal definition. Usually, a 'town' is thought of as larger than a village but smaller than a 'city,' though there are exceptions to this rule." Of course there are! But wouldn't it be easier to have this continuum:

village < town < city < metropolis < megalopolis

(Interestingly, my Safari spellcheck is not showing "megalopolis" as a misspelled word - when did THAT enter out lexicon?)

Also, what would be before village? Burg? Hamlet? Hovel?

In any event, I think it depends on where you're from - & your perception of where you're from - how you define something as a town, since the authorities have not seen fit to define it for us. For example, I grew up in Garland, Texas, which currently has a population of over two hundred thousand people & is the tenth-largest city in Texas. But compared to Dallas, it seems like a town. But Dallas is such a sprawling provincial place lacking in personality that, compared to real cities like New York or Chicago or San Francisco, it's really just a town. Which makes Garland, what? A village?

No, a suburb, which is quite an insulting term now that I think about it.

Huntington, where I now live, has around fifty thousand folks, & I'm sure many people here think it's a city, but it's not really a city. It's a town. I think virtually every large gathering of people & buildings in West Virginia is at best a town. We might have more people if we include the "metropolitan area," but we're still a bunch of towns.

Is that insulting? Would they rather be suburbs? Or, god forbid, exurbs?

I was going to add that sometimes we use the word "town" (as in saying, "I'm going down to Austin town") to show off a sense of familiarity. Like saying "London town" or "New York town." But that wouldn't figure into the mathematical equation I long for. Something like this:

Over 1 million inhabitants: metropolis
100,000 to 1 million inhabitants: city
25,000 to 100,000 inhabitants: town
5,000 to 25,000 inhabitants: township
100 to 5,000 inhabitants: village
2 - 100 inhabitants: hamlet
1 inhabitant: hermitage

It needs work. But it's a start!