The outskirts are the outer edges or borders of a town or city, where buildings become less dense and the urban area starts giving way to countryside or empty land. If you drive from the center of a city toward the suburbs and keep going, you'll eventually reach the outskirts: the last neighborhoods, strip malls, and scattered houses before you hit open fields or highways.

On the outskirts of a small town, you might find a few gas stations, some farmland, and houses spaced far apart. The outskirts feel different from downtown: quieter, less crowded, with more space between buildings. When someone says they live “on the outskirts,” they mean they're technically still part of the town but far from its busy center.

The word usually refers to the outer parts of a town or city, not the middle. You wouldn't normally say someone lives on the outskirts of a neighborhood, but you could say a baseball field sits on the outskirts of town. Think of the outskirts as the transitional zone where city meets country, where the last streetlights fade and the landscape opens up.