boomtown.

A town growing rapidly because of a sudden economic opportunity.

Use it for

Words that belong together

• mining boomtown
• frontier boomtown
• boomtown growth

On the page

The boomtown needed a school before it had finished building its second hotel.

In the oil boomtown, a rented room cost more than a farm elsewhere.

Prospectors reached the boomtown with money to spend and nowhere to sleep.

Usage notes

Primary category: setting. Implies an unusually fast influx of people and money; often suggests unstable prosperity, but decline is not part of the definition. Plural: boomtowns. No other inflection applies to this noun.