The word town shares an origin with the German word zaun, the Dutch word tuin, and the Old Norse tun.[1] The original Proto-Germanic word, *tunan, is thought to be an early borrowing from Proto-Celtic *dunon (cf. Old Irish dun, Welsh din).[2]

The original sense of the word in both Germanic and Celtic was that of a fortress or an enclosure. Cognates of ”town” in many modern Germanic languages designate a fence or a hedge.[3] In English and Dutch, the meaning of the word took on the sense of the space which these fences enclosed, and through which a track must run.[citation needed] In England, a town was a small community that could not afford or was not allowed to build walls or other larger fortifications, and built a palisade or stockade instead.[citation needed] In the Netherlands, this space was a garden, more specifically those of the wealthy, which had a high fence or a wall around them (like the garden of the palace of Het Loo in Apeldoorn, which was the model for the privy garden of William III and Mary II at Hampton Court). In Old Norse tun means a (grassy) place between farmhouses, and the word is still used with a similar meaning in modern Norwegian.

Old English tun became a common place-name suffix in England and southeastern Scotland during the Anglo-Saxon settlement period. In Old English and Early and Middle Scots, the words ton, toun, etc. could refer to diverse kinds of settlements from agricultural estates and holdings, partly picking up the Norse sense (as in the Scots word fermtoun) at one end of the scale, to fortified municipalities.[citation needed] Other common Anglo-Saxon suffixes included ham (”home”), stede (”stead”), and burh (”bury,” ”borough,” ”burgh”).