Nicknames of Chicago

This article lists nicknames for the city of Chicago, Illinois.

Windy City

This newspaper article was published by the Cleveland Gazette in 1885

The city of Chicago has been known by many nicknames, but it is most widely recognized as the "Windy City".

The earliest known reference to the "Windy City" was actually to Green Bay in 1856. The first known repeated effort to label Chicago with this nickname is from 1876 and involves Chicago's rivalry with Cincinnati. The popularity of the nickname endures to this day – 126 years after the Cincinnati rivalry ended.

Second City

"Second City" originates as an insult from a series of articles in The New Yorker by A. J. Liebling, later combined into a book titled Chicago: The Second City (1952). In it, Liebling writes about his hatred for Chicago and contrasts it to his hometown New York City. He complains about Chicago's economic decline, rampant organized crime and political corruption, declining population, outdated schools of thought, and general dependency on the cities along the east coast. The Chicago-based improv comedy group The Second City references Liebling's book in their self-mocking name. In 2011, Chicago announced its adoption of the slogan "Second to None", a protest stance directly referring to Liebling's publications. It was replaced with another in 2022.

An etymology popularized by tour guides suggests that it refers to the rebuilding of the city following the Great Chicago Fire in 1871.

Chi-town

"Chi-town", "Chi-Town", or "Chitown" (/ˈʃaɪtaʊn/ SHY-town) is a nickname that follows an established pattern of shortening a city's name and appending the suffix "-town", like "H-Town refers to Houston. Despite many mentions by well-known figures in popular works, such as C. W. McCall's song "Convoy", its popularity as a nickname used by locals is disputed. Wendy McClure wrote in the Chicago Reader in 2017 that it is the "cilantro of nicknames": its distastefulness depends on who is using it. Events and organizations often use the nickname, for example the hockey team Chi-Town Shooters, the WCW event Chi-Town Rumble, and the New Year's Eve event Chi-Town Rising.

City of Big Shoulders

Hog butcher for the world.jpg

"City of Big Shoulders" is a nickname coined by Carl Sandburg in his 1914 poem "Chicago", which describes the city as "stormy, husky, [and] brawling". It is the last of several nicknames in the poem; the others hint at the cities major industrial activities, for example the meat-packing industry and railroad industry. It is also sometimes said as the "City of Broad Shoulders".

Chiberia

"Chiberia" – a portmanteau of "Chicago" and "Siberia" – was coined by Richard Castro, a meteorologist working for CBS Chicago, during a cold wave in 2014 that brought the coldest temperatures to the city in multiple decades. The National Weather Service used the hashtag "#Chiberia" during its reporting on the cold wave. The nickname continues to be used during cold weather events, for example in 2017 and in 2019.

Chiraq

"Chiraq" – a portmanteau of "Chicago" and "Iraq" – controversially compares the city (given its crime rates) to war-torn Iraq. Chuck Goudie, a reporter for ABC7 Chicago, asserted that the nickname is based off a single misleading Iraq War statistic: from 2003 to 2012, 4,265 people were killed in Chicago, nearly equal to the number of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq in the same period. The statistic omits civilian deaths in Iraq, which dramatically raises its death toll. The origin of the nickname is not definitive, but saw increasing popularity in usage around the end of the Iraq War. For example, Spike Lee used the nickname as the title of his 2015 film, Lil Reese used it in his 2013 song "Traffic", and Urban Dictionary added it as an entry in 2012.

City in a Garden

In the 1830s, the government of Chicago adopted the motto "Urbs in Horto", a Latin term that translates to 'City in a Garden'. It is displayed in the city's seal. The Chicago Park District adopted a seal in 1934 that contains the Latin phrase Hortus in Urbe, meaning 'Garden in a City'.

Great Commercial Tree

"Great Commercial Tree" comes from the lyrics of the state anthem of Illinois: "... Till upon the inland sea, stands thy great commercial tree..."

Other nicknames

See also


This page was last updated at 2022-12-03 10:14 UTC. Update now. View original page.

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