Immediately adjacent to the city, north of the Bois de Boulogne, the area is composed of mostly select residential neighbourhoods, as well as many corporate headquarters and a handful of foreign embassies.

[3][4] Together with the 16th and 7th arrondissement of Paris, the town of Neuilly-sur-Seine forms the most affluent and prestigious residential area in the whole of France.

[6] Originally, Pont de Neuilly was a small hamlet under the jurisdiction of Villiers, a larger settlement mentioned in medieval sources as early as 832 and now absorbed by the commune of Levallois-Perret.

It was not until 1222 that the little settlement of Neuilly, established on the banks of the Seine, was mentioned for the first time in a charter of the Abbey of Saint-Denis: the name was recorded in Medieval Latin as Portus de Lulliaco, meaning "Port of Lulliacum".

[citation needed] Various explanations and etymologies have been proposed to explain these discrepancies in the names of Neuilly recorded over the centuries.

These researchers contend that it is only after the fall of the Roman Empire and the Germanic invasions that the area of Neuilly was deforested and settled.

Or perhaps the consonants were simply inverted under the influence of the many settlements of France called Neuilly (a frequent place name whose etymology is completely different from the special case of Neuilly-sur-Seine).

In 1929, the Bois de Boulogne, which was previously divided between the communes of Neuilly-sur-Seine and Boulogne-Billancourt, was annexed in its entirety by the city of Paris.

[8] Amidst a poor national showing of 20%, Neuilly gave right-wing candidate François Fillon 65% of its vote in the first round of the 2017 presidential election.