Origins
The word 'city' entered English around 1200 through Anglo-Norman 'cité,' from Old French 'cité,' ultimately from Latin 'cīvitātem,' the accusative form of 'cīvitās.' What makes this etymology particularly illuminating is that 'cīvitās' did not originally mean a physical settlement at all. In classical Latin, it meant 'citizenship,' 'the condition of being a citizen,' or 'the collective body of citizens.' The physical city was called 'urbs' — hence English 'urban,' 'urbane,' and 'suburb.' A Roman would say 'cīvitās Rōmāna' to mean 'the Roman citizenry' and 'urbs Rōma' to mean 'the physical city of Rome.' The two concepts — the people and the place — were linguistically distinct.
The gradual merger of these senses occurred during the late Roman and early medieval periods. As the Roman Empire fragmented and classical Latin evolved into the various Romance languages, 'cīvitās' absorbed the spatial meaning of 'urbs,' which fell out of common use except in learned registers. By the time of Old French, 'cité' meant both the community and the physical settlement, and it was in this merged sense that the word entered English after the Norman Conquest.
The Latin root 'cīvis' (citizen) traces to the PIE root *ḱey-, meaning 'to lie down' or 'to settle.' This is the same root that produced Proto-Germanic *haimaz (home) and Greek 'kōmē' (village), making 'city' and 'home' distant etymological relatives — both, at their deepest level, words about settling in a place. The divergence is striking: the Germanic branch preserved the root in a word connoting warmth, family, and emotional belonging ('home'), while the Italic branch developed it into a word connoting political organization, collective identity, and governance ('city,' 'citizen,' 'civic,' 'civil,' 'civilization').
French Influence
In medieval England, 'city' had a more specific meaning than it does today. A city was distinguished from a town by the presence of a cathedral — the seat (Latin 'sedes') of a bishop. This is why some very small English settlements like Ely, Wells, and St. Davids hold the title of 'city' despite having populations in the low thousands, while much larger towns like Middlesbrough did not receive city status until the twentieth century. The association between 'city' and episcopal authority reflects the word's arrival through the ecclesiastical culture of the Norman ruling class.
The Latin word 'cīvis' generated one of the richest word families in English. 'Citizen' (from Anglo-Norman 'citezein,' ultimately from 'cīvitās') retains the original sense of a member of a community. 'Civic' (from Latin 'cīvicus,' relating to citizens) describes matters of public life. 'Civil' (from Latin 'cīvīlis') originally meant 'of or befitting a citizen' and later acquired the senses of 'polite' (befitting civilized society) and 'non-military' (civilian as opposed to soldier). 'Civilization' itself — coined in French in the eighteenth century from 'civiliser' — encodes the idea that settled urban life under civic institutions represents the highest form of human social organization, a value judgment embedded in the word's very structure.
The phonological evolution from Latin 'cīvitātem' to English 'city' involved several regular sound changes in French: the loss of the unstressed medial syllable (cīvitātem → *civtate → *civtad → *cidtad → cité), the voicing and eventual deletion of intervocalic consonants, and the palatalization of 'c' before front vowels from /k/ to /ts/ and eventually to /s/. The English spelling 'city' with a 'y' reflects Middle English spelling conventions where 'y' often represented the reduced final vowel of French borrowings.