No Stupid Questions

The town my wife grew up in has 1 traffic light, and it's of the blinking yellow variety.

Rural town.

It doesn't have cows in it, but you can easily walk to where the cows are.

The numbers are pretty funky depending on who you ask. City nerd on YouTube has a nice video on it how people view themselves as rural/urban and what city planners think of it.

City nerd video

You have a lot of people that identify as rural even though they live in exurbs (town adjacent to city) and a lot of people that live in remote areas identify as urban people.

I'd personally say that people that live in a urban/metro area are not rural. People who live on a farm 50km from the next population center of 1000 people is definitely rural. Everything between depends on a lot of factors like how big is the village, what is the village close to etc.

American's rarely use the word "village" - a "town" can be anything from a few thousand people down to almost empty. It's very subjective - some places that make a proud point of calling themselves "the city of ..." are IMO small towns at best. Rural in America means surrounded by a fair amount of countryside, be it farmland or nature. I think most Americans loosely associate "urban" with closely packed tallish buildings,maybe 5-7 stories or more, and mostly wouldn't agree with you that a "town" is urban by definition. In common speech there's no clear threshold between large town and small city.

Anything with less than 50k is rural

Most towns are not urban by any standard. I ate dinner over the weekend in a town with a population of 669. It was big enough to have its own restaurant and post office. It was a 30-40 minute drive from any town with a population over 10,000 (and that, just barely).

Aight, so, we got cities/metropolitan areas, then we have the outer edge of cities called suburbs (could also be referred to as towns), then we got further out areas, which are rural, which have a lot of agriculture and wilderness.

"Small" and "rural" are used as qualifying adjectives, and typically compound. Rural: generally far from near by cities, lots of wilderness/agriculture around. Small: not a lot of residents or amenities.

Village is not a term that is commonly used, at least not where I'm from (midwest).

Your village is our small rural town: low population density, lots of wilderness/agriculture, not a lot of buildings.

“Village” isn’t used anywhere in the USA as far as I know. Places with <500 people call themselves a town usually. Where I’m from in NH (close to these towns), residents call themselves townies. “Small” is kinda just used as a grammatical intensifier in all the cases I’ve heard it used. YMMV in the south or Midwest though.

A lot of this is going to be subjective and depend on your personal frame of reference, as well as local laws and customs that can vary a lot around the country

In general, in normal casual conversation, most Americans are going to refer to a municipality as a "town" unless they're in a big city. Legally, that municipality might be considered a city, town, township, borough, home rule municipality, village, etc. but unless it's a big city we're probably going to refer to it as a town most of the time

There's also, in some areas, unincorporated communities that don't have an actual municipal government, but if there's a relatively dense area, we might go ahead and refer to that area as a town.

Some parts of the US do have some sort of legal definition for "village," in others it might be used informally to refer to a small "quaint" town, or part of the town.

There's also the distinction of, for example, being "in a town" vs "in town" or "downtown"

Most of us who don't live in a big city would say that we live in a town, meaning the municipality we live in. Somewhat less of us live "in town" meaning something more like the denser, more "urban" parts of town, probably resembling what you think of as a village, and "downtown" would refer to something like the area around the main street or main commercial area where you might find stores, restaurants, bars, etc.

So a "rural town" is basically any sort of town in a rural area. I'm not sure if there's any sort of a legal definition for a rural town, but in general I'd say that if a town is surrounded by woods and/or farmland and you can't trace an unbroken path of suburban sprawl from it back to a major city it's rural.

Some of those rural towns can actually be fairly big and urbanized, but they're otherwise in a rural area in their own little bubble so we'd still consider it to be a rural town.

As far as town vs "small town" that's kind of subjective.

The town I grew up in is often referred to as a small town, largely because it's physically pretty small, almost exactly 1 square mile, but that 1 mile is pretty densely populated, I think the population is around 9-10k people currently, it's just a couple miles outside of the nearest major city, and pretty well-urbanized itself, connected to several major highways, was once a big manufacturing town but is now pretty gentrified, with a solid handful of 10+ floor office buildings. People from more rural areas probably wouldn't agree that it's a "small town" but people from a bit city probably would think so, and for those of us "townies" whose families have lived here for a few generations still feel like it has a small town feel, even if the newer transplants don't all share that feeling.

The town I currently live in isn't quite rural, but it's getting there. I'm towards the edge of the suburbs now, maybe even into the exurbs. The town is physically much larger, but only has about half the population. That small, less dense population makes it still feel kind of small-towny.

Also worth noting, my town doesn't really have any sort of a "downtown" area, no real main street to go walking around or anything. We have a few businesses and stores and such roughly clustered in the same area, but it's not a cohesive thing that feels like a "town" or what you might recognize as a "village." I would normally may this, but if I said I was going "into town" for something, most people around me would probably understand that I'm going to one of our neighboring towns that are a bit more built-up

So some combination of physical size, population, population density, and a curtain je ne sais quoi are what makes a town a small town.

Americans would likely use the term "small town" over "village" in most of the country.

Also the physical layout of a small town would likely be different and much more car dependent.

As a non-American, I’m very confused by this. If it’s a town, it’s not rural by definition. Because, you-know, it’s urban.

A rural town is a very small town or populated area within a large rural area. The US is a huge country, with very large swaths of rural areas throughout, especially west of the Mississippi. In these large rural areas are scattered small towns of various sizes (say, less than a hundred to less than a thousand or so people), with long stretches of unpopulated (or very sparsely populated) areas between them. That's why they're called rural towns--no one would call them "urban" by any stretch of the imagination. They may have the things you mentioned (a post office and bar/pub/eatery) but not much more. But even if you're technically in a town, you are still effectively rural, since you're nowhere near a significant population center with anything like hospitals/doctors, shopping, services, etc., and a car is required to reach them (no public transit and much too far to walk or bike). Look at online maps to get the idea.

As for the word "village", that's mostly used in the NE part of the country and tends to have a bit more specific definition. Elsewhere, most of us would just say "town".

My uncle lives up in Omak

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omak,_Washington

This is a small town. We don't call them villages, we call them towns for some reason.

Technically speaking, Omak is a city actually. But pretty much everyone will call it a town around here.

It means the town doesn't have a Walmart

Here are some descriptions and photos of what most small towns look like: https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/trip-ideas/washington/slow-paced-towns-in-wa

A really small town is like what you're calling a village. I think most people outside the US think that rural is closer to urban areas than it usually is. It typically starts a half hour outside a major city and then can be 7-10 hours to the next major city depending on what state you're in. The upper east coast is probably closer to Europe. Rural encompasses a huge swath of the US land, and most are very isolated physically and mentally.

Here is a map showing the population densities by county: https://irjci.blogspot.com/2020/08/census-bureau-to-end-counting-efforts.html

Like a town population 500 or less not within a hour drive of a city.

I live in Nebraska grew up in a village of 30 people, went to school in a town of 2500. Live currently in a town of 300.

Edit - since I received some upvotes and I'm no longer at my daughter's softball game. I wanted to add when I was in school 30 some years ago, my geography teacher told us Nebraska actually didn't have towns due to population requirements that there wasn't one that actually defined a town, it's was technically city or village. Whether that's still true or not I have no idea.

They're still cities, but people tend to start calling them "rural" when you get a certain distance from the big cities and things spread out, often also near farmland and/or nature.

For example, this would probably count as rural.

Poor OP. They're leaving this thread more confused than ever.

The United States is huge and every region has different definitions and expectations of "city", "town", "suburb", "wide place in the road", etc. LOL, when I was a kid we called Tulsa, OK a "small town". Well, yeah, as opposed to Chicagoland.

You won't find anything definitive, but we don't use the word "village" except to connote... well, I can't really say. But I know one when I see it!

Your definition of village is the equivalent of a rural town in the US.

so by way of examples, going to some extremes...

Kent County, Texas is one of the most rural counties in the US. with Jayton hosting its county court house. As of the 2020 census, the entire county has less than one thousand people. The terms small town/town are somewhat nebulous, But usually in really rural places it’s someplace with a few shops and maybe a neighborhood and school and stuff.

This is a sat photo of Jayton, compliments of google maps:

Jayton has about 500 people.

Note, that the mile is about 1.25 miles/ 2 km's north to south and about the same in east west. (at least, as far the structures/housing goes.) to get an idea of what it looks like there, here's the streetview in front of the court house.

zooming out to kent county, there's like 5 towns in that entire square, note the distance marker down at the bottom being about 8 km:

now, compare that to new york city:

Note, the distance marker at the bottom being about 3 km.

zooming in to roughly the same scale as the photo on jayton.... randomly....

and here's a few courthouses in brooklyn....

and the king's county courthouse on streetview

There are named towns in the US with populations in the single digits. This can be due to either the population moving away, fleeing, or simply dying off over time -- Centralia, PA leaps to mind -- or because it's just a cluster of a couple of houses at a crossroads that would otherwise be in the middle of nowhere. There may not necessarily be a post office or any other services there.

In fact, there are "towns" in the US in that they are named on the map and have a defined location filed with the state/county/Postal Service, but they have no inhabitants at all. In many cases this is because a planned development never actually happened.

NY has towns and villages. A township is way larger than a village. For example the Town of Huntington vs the incorporated Village of Lloyd Harbor within the town. We also have hamlets, like Huntington Village, which are similar but unincorporated.

However, all of this I'd consider suburban, not rural.

An American Small Town sounds a lot like your village.

But, we have like 10,000x as much space to spread out in, so we can have these villages every 10 miles or so in every direction. You could easily drive for 24 hours across the country and easily avoid all major cities.

Just wait until you find out about townships.

We don't understand villages, you don't understand football. We're just different.

"Town" is generally used to mean "something smaller than a city". I live in a town, and the population is about 30K. It's technically a township, but people don't really use that term widely. I know that doesn't really clear things up, but your real answer is "it's complicated".