Short answers, pulled from the story.
A village typically houses a few hundred to a few thousand people. In India, there were 649,481 villages in 2011, with 236,004 having a population of fewer than 500 and 3,976 having over 10,000. In South Africa, villages vary in size from having a population of less than 500 to around 1,000.
The Industrial Revolution attracted people in larger numbers to work in mills and factories, causing the concentration of people that enabled many villages to grow into towns and cities. This trend of urbanization continues but not always in connection with industrialization. In the 1960s and 1970s, the depopulation of smaller villages was driven by central planners' drive to get farm workers out of smaller hamlets and into collective or state farms.
In New York, Hempstead is the largest village with 55,000 residents. In Michigan, the largest village is Beverly Hills in Southfield Township, which had a population of 10,267 people as of the 2010 census. In Wisconsin, the largest village is Menomonee Falls, which has over 32,000 residents.
In Great Britain, a hamlet earned the right to be called a village when it built a church. The main historical distinction between a hamlet and a village was that the latter had a church. Historically, the formal indication of status was religious, with a city having a cathedral, a selo having a church, and a derevnya having neither.
An independent association named Les Plus Beaux Villages de France was created in 1982 to promote assets of small and picturesque villages. There are 172 villages listed as of July 2023. In Italy, the association I Borghi più belli d'Italia was created in 2001, with 361 villages listed as of November 2023.