2921: The [City Name]: Uncommon Articles Dec 20, 2024

There are a handful of specific place names in the US and UK beginning with ‘the —’ but these are almost always reserved for very small towns or villages; the only large example seems to be “the Bronx” which is not its own city per se, but the next largest, the Dalles, Oregon, US, has a population nearly 1000th the size. If you can find others that are larger, please write in. 

Even in a language like French that includes definite articles for continents and provinces/states, for instance “j'adore l'Europe, mais je déteste la Californie” (“I adore [the] Europe but I hate [the] California”), French does not add articles before cities. 

Meanwhile, this practice, while far from the default, is found more commonly in Dutch, most notably in The Hague or Den Haag natively, population 550K. Officially, it's 's-Gravenhage (more on that next post) but it's joined by Den Bosch population 160K and Den Helder population 56K.  These places are all named usually after historical estates of wealthy landowners and just describe the land such as ‘den haag’ (‘the hedge’).