Township has two lives, and which one you meet depends on the country.

In the US and Canada, a township is a unit of local government — a division of a county, smaller than a city, with its own small council that handles roads, snow clearing, local rules. It is an administrative box drawn on a map, and it may be mostly farmland with only a few hundred people in it. In much of the American Midwest these boxes are literally squares, six miles by six miles, because the land was surveyed on a grid before people moved in. So an American 'township' can contain no town at all — which surprises everyone learning the word.

In South Africa, a township is something completely different and much heavier: a settlement on the edge of a city where black South Africans were forced to live under apartheid. Soweto is the famous one. These places were built out of segregation, and although apartheid is over, the townships and their poverty remain. If you read the word in a news story about South Africa, this is what it means, and the word carries all that history with it.

You will also see township used in official English for administrative areas in other countries, including here — Taiwan's 鄉 and 鎮 are translated as township in government documents, which is why you will meet the word on English-language maps and forms.

The key thing to hold on to: township is an administrative word, not a description of what a place looks like. A town is a place. A township is a line on a map with a government attached.