As you’ll remember from a post earlier in the week (or perhaps not…maybe you had big nights out on Friday and Saturday), Historicalness received two requests last week to detail the meanings behind some of those bizarre three-letter airport codes and one of the more colorful town names out there.

After days of extensive work performed by Historicalness’s top-notch research team, we’ve uncovered the following morsels.

Airport Codes

Not all airport codes are illogical.  No doubt it’s a source of infinite pride that New Yorkers can say that theirs actually make sense: “LGA” for LaGuardia Airport and “JFK” for John F. Kennedy International Airport.

Sadly, not every other part of the country can say the same.  LA’s code used to be “LA” and Phoenix’s used to be “PH”, but then the world got bigger and everyone moved to three-letter codes to allow for more combinations.  So they picked a random third letter — “X” — and slapped it to the end, leaving us with LAX” and “PHX”.

Some airports have three-letters that refer to prior names — and no one has gotten around to updating them.  So we have Chicago’s O’Hare as “ORD” after its name in the 1940’s of Orchard Field.  And we have New Orleans’s Louis Armstrong International Airport as “MSY” after “Moisant Stock Yards”, the site of aviator daredevil John Moisant’s 1910 fatal crash.

So if you’ve ever scratched your head about codes that seem to make no sense, you’re not crazy — but a little history will clarify the mystery.

Town Names

Historicalness was asked to track down the history behind the colorful name of “Intercourse, PA”.  We’ve had worse assignments.  The town of 1,500 in the heart of Amish Country (Harrison Ford’s Witness was filmed here) was founded in 1754, originally as Cross Keys.

Gotta see it to believe it

No one seems to know exactly how the town got its name, but theories range from the intersection of two main cross-state roads to the meaning of the term two centuries ago when it connoted the ideals of fellowship so important in the community.

If you’ve come across any other theories, please let us know!

Wow.  What a week.  In the history of Historicalness.com, we’ve never had a week quite like it.

First, the Giants and Patriots both win in dramatic fashion to set up a rematch of the Super Bowl four years ago.  I know who I’m cheering for even if we don’t have David Tyree.

Second, we received not one, but two (!) requests from you, our great readers, for future posts — both were related to last week’s “naming” theme.  One, from an ol’  college roommate (and Pats fan) who expatriated from the east coast to a country far to the west called Los Angeles, was to detail the meanings behind some of those bizarre three-letter airport codes.  The second, from another fellow alum (football allegiance unknown), was to describe the meanings behind some of the more colorful town names out there, and in particular, Intercourse, PA.

We’ll tackle both of these requests this week.  And if you have a request of your own or a suggestion for a post, feel free to email me at matt [ at ] historicalness [ dot ] com.

But today I wanted to share a travel experience from this weekend which hopefully saves you from panicking next time you arrive at the airport only to realize you don’t have your driver’s license.

So it was that I found myself in the security line at Newark Airport without any photo ID.  I figured that they would automatically reject me from passing through.  But 45 minutes later, after getting to know 12 TSA agents, including bomb specialists who didn’t like the looks of my contact solution, I was waived on through to my gate.

More importantly, the process worked the same way getting home (actually, it was even easier — I didn’t have to deal with any extra security checks at all).  So I was back in NY to catch the Giants’ victory in its entirety.  What a week.

Last time we looked at the meanings behind the names of the top 10 US cities.  I thought it would be interesting to do the same for the top 10 cities globally.

(Note: There are many lists that rank the largest cities, but who’s on the list and who falls where depends on whether suburbs/greater metro areas are included in the population counts.  For our purposes, we’re counting just the city proper.)

Top 10 Cities Worldwide

1. Shanghai, China: named in the 11th century, it’s a combination of the Chinese characters “above” and “sea”.  Extra credit if you can write both the characters.
2. Istanbul, Turkey:  derived from Greek meaning “in the city” or “to the city”.  The name has been around since the 10th century, and became the city’s official name in 1930 so foreigners would stop calling it Constantinople.
3. Karachi, Pakistan: the city’s name is a distortion of the last name of a fisherwoman, Mai Kolachi, who headed the village there a long, long time ago.  Date unknown.
4. Mumbai, India: named in 1995 (formerly Bombay), it’s a combination of “Mumba”, the name of a goddess, and “Aai”, meaning “mother”.
5. Beijing, China: exact date of naming unclear, but the site has been settled for 3,000 years.  Name means “northern capital”.
6. Moscow, Russia:  named in 12th century after the Moskva River
7. Sao Paulo, Brazil:  named in 1554 after Saint Paul
8. Guangzhou, China:  exact date of naming unclear, but the site has been settled for 2,500 years.  Name means “vast state”
9. Delhi, India:  exact date of naming unclear, but the site has been settled for 2,500 years.  Meaning of “Delhi” has many possibilities, including after a King Dhillu and the Hindi word “dhili” or “loose”
10. Seoul, South Korea:  named in 1945 after the Korean word for “capital city” (although the site has been settled for 2,000 years)

Two things I find interesting about the cities’ names are:

• Some of them are old.  Really old.  Not geologic time old.  But still old enough that the derivation of their names is unclear or has multiple possibilities
• In the US, the date a city was settled at scale (i.e. excluding indigenous populations) matches the date that it received the name we know today (or it’s pretty close…e.g. New York was only New Amsterdam for 50 years before it changed).  However, for these cities globally, the sites may have been settled at scale for centuries before they were renamed as the places we know them today.

If you have any insights, please feel free to email me at matt [ at ] historicalness [ dot] com.

I had to be in Seattle last week for work, and there’s nothing like travel to make you curious about everyday things you usually ignore at home.  I got to wondering about the origins of the city’s name — turns out it was named in 1853 after Chief Seattle (actually spelled Si’ahl) who led tribes local to the area.

Here's Chief Seattle. I'm just impressed there's even a photo of him. Source: Wikipedia

This got me thinking about where the names of other US cities come from.  I’ll start with the top 10…Letterman-style…although I’m actually a Conan guy:

Top 10 Largest US Cities

1. New York: named in 1664 after England’s Duke of York who went on to become King James II (England’s last Catholic king who had daughters Mary and Anne…Mary being the one who married William and together overthrew James, Anne being the one who succeeded them and was the final monarch in the House of Stuart).
2. Los Angeles: named in 1781, derived from the original Spanish name for the town — in English, “The Town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels” (“Queen of the Angels” being one of the Virgin Mary’s Roman Catholic titles)
3. Chicago: named in 1679, derived from the Miami-Illinois (Native American) word for “wild onion” which is “shikaakwa”…sound it out-loud…it’s pretty cool
4. Houston: named in 1876 after Sam Houston, a general and later President of Texas
5. Philadelphia: named in 1682 after a city in what was Asia Minor (and is now in modern-day Turkey) whose name means “brotherly love” in Greek.  Now I know where the slogan comes from.
6. Phoenix: named in 1865 after the mythical bird
7. San Antonio: named in 1691 after Saint Anthony when Spanish explorers came upon the site on the feast day of “St. Anthony of Padua”
8. San Diego: named in 1602 after Saint Didacus (aka San Diego de Alcala) by a Spanish explorer (also the name of the explorer’s ship)
9. Dallas: named in 1844, unclear after whom as there are a handful of likely candidates with that last name
10. San Jose: named in 1777, derived from the original Spanish name, “El Pueblo de San José de Guadalupe” (“San Jose” or “Saint Joseph” being Jesus’ earth dad)

Two items I find interesting here:

• Three of the top 10 cities got (and have maintained) the names that we know today as far back as the 1600s despite not being located on the east coast.  I guess the US really isn’t a Saul Steinberg cartoon.

• There’s extensive diversity of language origin — above, we see names rooted in four languages: English, Spanish, Greek, and Miami-Illinois.  I wonder if any other country’s largest cities have as extensive a mix.

Next time I’ll do names for the largest cities globally.