982: -grad (Eastern European Cities) Aug 17, 2017

There are lots of cities in the Americas with the word 'city' in the name, like Oklahoma City, the capital of Oklahoma, or Mexico City (Ciudad de Mexico), the capital of Mexico. In other parts of the word this is not so common, or at least not outright. Some European cities, particularly in places that speak Germanic languages with the exception of Strasbourg have the ending '-burg' which no longer means 'city', but historically meant 'fort' or what might have constituted 'city' at the time. Likewise, the names of cities in Eastern European countries often appear with the ending '-grad', though the spelling is sometimes slightly different. The capital of Serbia is 'Belgrade' coming from Slavic for 'white city'. There are a number of other Eastern European places whose name meant 'white city' including 'Belgorod' in Russia and 'Biograd na Moru' in Croatia. It should be noted that Croatian and Serbian are incredibly similar, and the Serbian pronunciation for their own capital city is 'Beograd': almost identical to 'Biograd'. Plenty of other places have that ending but don't mean 'white city' historically, such as 'Petrograd', the name for St. Petersburg between 1914 and 1924. In fact, 'Petrograd' was adopted as the name in 1914 instead of St. Petersburg to make it sound less German and more Slavic.