(no subject)

[pensnest]

I found a website with a sorta quiz called How many US cities can you name?

I managed 47, more specifically, I named 47 cities, with a total population of 35,631,847 (15.59% of the national urban population in 2010), and have no idea whether that is a good score or not! (Though I am quite pleased to say that in the vast majority of cases I knew which state they were in.)

However, if I were trying to list UK cities, I don't think somewhere with a population of 3,598 (Nome, Alaska) would make the grade. So what is the American definition of a city? (To be fair, I don't quite know what the British definition of a city is either. But size matters.)

Comments

[randomling]

I think "city status" is granted by the government these days? (It used to be "do you have a cathedral", I think.)

I have no idea was the US criteria are! I... may have set myself a goal of 100 and reached it. (There were a fair few educated guesses in there, though.) my list!

[pensnest]

I think you must be right - and if I were to name British cities, I'd definitely need a computer program to check whether the ones I named were actually, officially, cities!

100 is pretty good!

[breathedout]

It definitely doesn't limit itself to what a US person would think of as a "city," either; I put in, for example, Morro Bay, which is my favorite and very tiny seaside town in California, and it showed up as a city. It could just be any entity that's incorporated/has a charter from the county or state.

[antisoppist]

Eldest made me do a Sporcle quiz on the biggest UK towns by population and some of them were places that did not immediately spring to mind. There were also places that I (ignorant southerner) thought were bits of Manchester or Newcastle that turned out to be places in their own right. It all depends how you divide it up.