• "Cowtown" is generally thought of as a smaller town, another word for a "hicktown"
• It also sometimes refers to towns that participated in the beef industry in the late 1800s and that had many stockyards, slaughterhouses, etc...
• A frequent main destination of major cattle-drives.

The Webster's New Millennium Dictionary of English defines a "cowtown" as:

• "a small, isolated, and rather unsophisticated town"
• Cowtown is a nickname for:
• Calgary, Alberta
• Fort Worth, Texas
• Hamilton, New Zealand
• Vacaville, California - Although 'Vacaville' can be translated from Spanish to English as 'cow town', the city actually takes its name from one of its first modern-day inhabitants, Juan Manuel Vaca.
• '''Cowtown is a former nickname for:
• Chicago, Illinois
• Kansas City, Missouri
• Dallas, Texas
• Columbus, Ohio
• San Jose, California

Cowtown may also refer to:

• The play Cowtown by Allison Moore
• a museum in Wichita, Kansas
• a song by the band They Might Be Giants
• Cowtown Rodeo in New Jersey
• the Cowtown Coliseum, an arena used for rodeos in Fort Worth.