A town is a community of people ranging from a few hundred to several thousands, although it may be applied loosely even to huge metropolitan areas. Usually, a "town" is thought of as larger than a village but smaller than a "city". The words "city" and "village" came into English from Latin via French. "Town" and "borough" (also "burrow", "burgh", "bury", etc.) are of native Germanic origin, from Old English burg, a fortified settlement, and tūn, an enclosed piece of land.

Origin and use around the world
In Australia, the status of a town is formally applied in only a few states. Most states do define cities, and towns are commonly understood to be those centres of population not formally declared to be cities and usually with a population in excess of about 250 people.
The creation and delimitation of Local Government Areas is the responsibility of the state and territory Governments. In all states and the Northern Territory each incorporated area has an official status. The various LGA status types currently in use are:

New South Wales: Cities (C) and Areas (A)
Victoria: Cities (C), Rural Cities (RC), Boroughs (B) and Shires (S)
Queensland: Cities (C), Shires (S), Towns (T) and Island Councils (IC)
South Australia: Cities (C), Rural Cities (RC), Municipalities/Municipal Councils (M), District Councils (DC), Regional Councils (RegC) and Aboriginal Councils (AC)
Tasmania: Cities (C) and Municipalities (M)
Western Australia: Cities (C), Towns (T) and Shires (S)
Northern Territory: Cities (C), Towns (T), Community Government Councils (CGC) and Shires (S). Australia

Australian Bureau of Statistics: Australian Standard Geographical Classification (ASGC) 2005 Austria
In Chile towns are defined by the National Statistics Institute (INE) as an urban entity with a population from 2001 to 5000 or an area with a population from 1001 to 2000 and an established economic activity.

Chile
From an administrative standpoint, the smallest level of local authorities are all called "communes". However, some laws do treat these authorities differently based on the population and specific rules apply to the three main cities Paris, Lyon and Marseille. For historical reasons, six communes in the Meuse département still exist as independent entities despite having no inhabitant at all.
For statistical purposes, the national statistical institute (INSEE) operates a distinction between urban areas with fewer than 2,000 inhabitants and bigger communes, the latter being called "villes". Smaller settlements are usually called "villages". In any case, the French language does not commonly make a difference between towns and cities.

France
Germans do not, in general, differentiate between city and town. The German word for both is "Stadt" as it is in many other languages that do not make any difference between the Anglo-Saxon concepts. A town with more than 100,000 inhabitants is called a Großstadt, which is the most adequate equivalence for city. In Germany also the historical importance (many settlements became a Stadt by being awarded a Stadtrecht in medieval times), the centrality and the population density of an urban place might be taken as characteristics of a "city". The word for a village, as a smaller settlement, is Dorf.
In southern German states the word Markt or Marktflecken designates a town-like residential community between village and city.
The current local government organisation is subject to state law of a Bundesland and the related denomination of a specific settlement may differ from its common designation (e. g. Samtgemeinde - a Lower Saxony legal term for a group of villages (Dorf, pl. Dörfer) with common local government). Designations in different Bundesländern are as diverse as for example in Australian States and Territories and differ from Bundesland to Bundesland.

Germany
In Hungary, a village can gain the status of "város" (town), if it meets a set of diverse conditions for quality of life and development of certain public services and utilities (e.g. having a local secondary school or installing full-area sewage collection pipe network). Every year the Minister of Internal Affairs selects candidates from a committee-screened list of applicants, whom the President of Republic usually affirms by issuing a bill of town's rank to them. Since being a town carries extra fiscal support from the government, many relatively small villages try to win the status of "városi rang" nowadays.
Before the fall of communism in 1990, Hungarian villages under 10,000 residents were not allowed to become towns. Recently some settlements as small as 2,500 souls have received the rank of town (e.g. Zalakaros or Gönc) and meeting the conditions of development are often disregarded to quickly elevate larger villages into towns. As of early 2007, there are 289 towns in Hungary, encompassing some 65% of the entire population.
Towns of more than 50,000 people are able to gain the status of "megyei jog" (town with the rights of a county), which allows them to maintain own courts and a higher degree of autonomy. As of early 2007, there are only 23 such towns in Hungary.

Hungary
In India, under most state laws, no village or settlement can be classified as a town unless its population crosses 20,000 inhabitants. On the basis of population and other issues, the state government notifies a larger community (over 10,000) as a notified area, and its administration is under the locally elected notified area committee. A settlement over 20,000 population would be classified, with a charter from the state government as a town, with a town area committee. Some laws distinguish only towns and villages from each other, but by usage, settlement with larger populations, such as those having a municipal committee or municipal corporation would be called cities. The recent Census of India classified all settlements above 5000 population (subject to some other rules) as urban areas for the sake of census. [1]

India
In the Netherlands no distinction is made between "city" and "town"; both translate as "stad".
Before 1848 there was a legal distinction between stad and non-stad parts of the country, but the word no longer has any legal significance. About 220 places got "stadsrechten" (city rights) and are still so called for historical and traditional reasons, though the word is also used for large urban areas that never got such rights. The contrastive word for a village as a smaller settlement is dorp.

Netherlands
Similarly to Germany, in Poland there is no difference between city and town. Polish word for city is miasto and the only difference between a very big village (in Polish wieś) and a small city is the administrative status of the latter one. Many Polish villages are older than some relatively young cities. For example wieś Mstow is nearly 100 years older than the closely located town of Częstochowa.

Poland

Main article: Types of inhabited localities in Russia Sweden

United Kingdom
In England and Wales, a town traditionally was a settlement which had a charter to hold a market or fair and therefore became a "market town". Market towns were distinguished from villages in that they were the economic hub of a surrounding area, and were usually larger and had more facilities.
In modern usage the term town is used either for old market towns, or for settlements which have a Town Council, or for settlements which elsewhere would be classed a city, but which do not have the legal right (by Letters Patent) to call themselves such. Any parish council can decide to describe itself as a Town Council, but this will usually only apply to the smallest "towns" (because larger towns will be larger than a single civil parish).
Not all settlements which are commonly described as towns have a "Town Council" or "Borough Council". In fact, because of many successive changes to the structure of local government, there are now few large towns which are represented by a body closely related to their historic borough council. These days, a smaller town will usually be part of a local authority which covers several towns. And where a larger town is the seat of a local authority, the authority will usually cover a much wider area than the town itself (either a large rural hinterland, or several other, smaller towns).
Alternatively there are also "new towns" which were created during the 20th century, such as Basildon, Redditch and Telford. Milton Keynes was designed to be a "new city" but legally it is still a town despite its size.
Curiously some settlements which describe themselves as towns (e.g. Shipston-on-Stour, Warwickshire) are smaller than some large villages (e.g. Kidlington, Oxfordshire).

Main article: City status in the United Kingdom England and Wales

Main article: List of towns in the Republic of Ireland United States