Levittown

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A post-war suburban community on Long Island, New York, built with identical mass-produced houses ; a generic term for any similar uniform housing development
2. A mass-built suburb on Long Island, New York, famous for its rows of identical homes ; any suburban estate of standardized, cookie-cutter houses
3. A planned residential town on Long Island built from prefabricated, identical homes in the late 1940s ; used broadly for any tract of nearly identical suburban houses

Etymology: Levittown is a blend of "Levitt" and "town", named after the Levitt family of developers. William Levitt and his sons Alfred and Augustus, builders in New York, applied factory-style methods to housing, producing near-identical single-family houses on a mass scale. The best-known of their projects was built on Long Island, and the name spread so widely that the word became a general term for any suburban development of uniform homes. The Levitts' surname is the source of the first half, so the word works like a proper noun that lost its capital letter in general use. Its second element, "town", supplies the sense of a settlement, though the places it describes are usually suburbs rather than independent communities. The blend pattern is a familiar one in English, where a name plus a common noun can produce a new word for a type of place.