Oppidans

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Students who board in the town adjoining Eton College, as opposed to the scholars who live within the school itself
2. Non-boarding pupils of Eton College who reside in the nearby town rather than in the school's own houses
3. Eton schoolboys living in the surrounding town instead of the college, a term used in the English public school tradition

Etymology: Oppidans are the ordinary pupils at Eton College, as opposed to the scholarship boys called collegers who lived in the school's foundation. The name is a plain Latin adjective: "oppidanus" meant "of a town" or "provincial," and it was built from "oppidum," a town that was not a city-state (urbs) in its own right, with the usual suffix "-anus" that turns a noun into an adjective. The word is therefore a close cousin of "urban," which comes from the Latin for city, and the pair shows how Romans separated the walled settlement from the capital. This is the plural of "oppidan," so each pupil is one oppidan, and the group is the oppidans as a whole.