Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A citizen; an inhabitant of a city; especially, a cockney of London: used in disparagement.
  • noun An abbreviation of citation
  • noun of cited
  • noun of citizen.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun A citizen; an inhabitant of a city; a pert townsman; -- used contemptuously.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun archaic townsman, citydweller (term of contempt)

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Shortened from citizen.

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Examples

  • I’m no expert, but my under­stand­ing is that the psy­cho­log­i­cal devel­op­ment of eat­ing dis­or­ders is almost wholly unmo­ti­vated by health con­cerns, so I hope I wasn’t being too insen­si­tive in cit­ing wide­spread med­ical belief that being obese will kill you, prob­a­bly faster than being unath­letic.

    Real Beauty « Snarkmarket 2005

  • I am what is contemptuously called a cit, yet I was treated with unfailing courtesy wherever I went.

    A Christmas Bride Balogh, Mary 1997

  • To smoke was characteristic of the "cit," of the country squire, of the clergy (especially of the country parsons), and of those of lower social status.

    The Social History of Smoking George Latimer Apperson 1897

  • "Any girl who will go East and marry a 'cit' and leave six or seven penniless subs sighing behind her,

    The Deserter Charles King 1888

  • I resigned in favor of a big 'cit' who's worth only twenty thousand a year, Nan, and she has been engaged to him all this time and never let me know until to-night. "

    Starlight Ranch and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier Charles King 1888

  • As Holliday points out, “We should not model ‘best practice’, which is ideologically embedded, but encourage spaces for reflection on and scrutiny of existing practice” (op. cit, p. 59).

    April « 2010 « An A-Z of ELT 2010

  • Traditionally called the White Dodo of Réunion, the bird in the Teylers drawing is now thought to show an albino specimen (Fuller, op. cit., p. 170), which may also be the case in the present drawing.

    Dutch School Dronte 2010

  • Such judgment ignores not only the atmosphere of unbridled Cheka terror prevailing at the time, but the fact that Tikhon in a subsequent epistle (July 21, 1919) urged Christians under no condition to wreak revenge for the sufferings they had endured .... [op. cit., p. 345]

    Eastern Europe 2009

  • And Mitchell and Myles (op. cit.) point out that “the theory becomes impossible to verify, as no independently testable definitions are given of what comprehensible input actually consists of, and therefore of how it might relate to acquisition” (p. 48).

    Z is for ZPD « An A-Z of ELT 2010

  • As Holliday points out, “We should not model ‘best practice’, which is ideologically embedded, but encourage spaces for reflection on and scrutiny of existing practice” (op. cit, p. 59).

    N is for Native-speakerism « An A-Z of ELT 2010

Comments

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  • Wiktionary says "1. (archaic) townsman, citydweller (term of contempt)" (here)

    As in: "'To return to young men not of the lower orders,' the Baron went on, 'at the present moment my head has been turned by a strange little fellow, an intelligent little cit who shows with regard to myself a prodigious want of civility'."

    --Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 16 of the Modern Library paperback edition

    January 22, 2009

  • Slate, January 2015:

    The electronic system was created in 1983 but paper citations, or “cits,” were also generated until 2009.

    January 14, 2015