Random City Generator US
Get random US cities for road trips, trivia, or mock datasets. Choose how many results you want and filter by starts, contains, or ends with.
Random City US
How this random US city generator works
Press Generate and you get an American city and its state. Turn up the Number box for several at once, no repeats. Copy takes them.
The entries are in population order, not alphabetical. New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix.
And then, ahead of San Francisco and a long way ahead of Boston, sits Jacksonville.
Why Jacksonville outranks Boston
Jacksonville, Florida, is the tenth most populous city in the United States. Its population at the 2020 census was 949,611.
Ask anybody which is the bigger city, Jacksonville or Boston, and nobody says Jacksonville.
They are not wrong, and neither is the census. What they are disagreeing about is where the city ends.
Jacksonville's city limits are the boundaries of Duval County. Nearly the whole county. About 874 square miles of it, which makes Jacksonville the largest city by land area in the contiguous United States.
The Jacksonville metropolitan area holds about 1.76 million people, which is the number that corresponds to what anybody means by "the city". But the city, the legal municipality, has swallowed its own suburbs, and the census counts them.
The vote that made a city
Between 1960 and 1965, voters living outside Jacksonville's city limits rejected annexation in six separate referendums. They did not want to be in the city.
Then several things went wrong at once. Suburban flight drained the tax base. City services ran short of money. In 1964, all fifteen of Duval County's public high schools lost their accreditation.
A consolidation plan was drafted. In 1967 it went to a referendum across the whole county and about 65 percent voted yes. On 1 October 1968 the city government and the county government merged.
Overnight, without a single person moving house, Jacksonville became one of the largest cities in America.
The line is the measurement
This is the thing to take away from any list of American cities in population order.
A city's population is not a count of the people who live in the place. It is a count of the people who live inside a legal boundary, and in the United States that boundary is the outcome of a century of local votes.
Cities that spent the twentieth century annexing their suburbs look enormous. Cities hemmed in by independent towns that were never going to say yes look small, because their figure describes only the old core.
The census is not lying. It is measuring exactly what it says: the population of the city proper. What the number cannot tell you is that it is an artefact of arguments about where a line should go, most of which were settled before anybody reading this was born.
Five Springfields
American city names repeat, constantly, and the repeats are genuinely different cities.
Springfield appears five times among the largest thousand: Missouri, Illinois, Massachusetts, Oregon, Ohio. Columbus appears three times. Kansas City sits on both sides of a state line, once in Missouri and once in Kansas, and they are two municipalities with two governments.
Jacksonville, Portland, Cleveland, Aurora, Glendale, Arlington and Richmond all name more than one American city, and about fifty other names do too.
Which is why every entry here carries a state. Springfield, MO. Springfield, MA. Springfield, IL.
A city name is not an identifier. It never was, and any database that treats it as one will eventually merge two towns a thousand miles apart and never mention it.
Puerto Rico's cities are municipios
Bayamón. Carolina. Ponce. Caguas. Guaynabo. Mayagüez. Trujillo Alto. Arecibo.
Every one of them is large enough to belong among America's biggest cities, and not one of them is in a state.
Puerto Rico is a United States territory. Its subdivisions are municipios, which cover the whole island the way counties cover a state, rather than the incorporated municipalities that make up the rest of the country. A municipio contains both its urban core and the countryside around it.
So a Puerto Rican city and a mainland city are not the same kind of object, and ranking them against each other compares a county-like unit with a town-like one.
They are tagged PR, they are real places with real people in them, and if your address form has a dropdown of fifty states, they will fail it. That is a fact about the form.
Ways people actually use this
- Test data. Unambiguous, because the state travels with the name. The Puerto Rican entries will test whether your address form believes Puerto Rico exists.
- Quizzes. Cover the state, show the city, ask. Then try it with Springfield, and again with Columbus.
- Writing. American fiction needs somewhere plausible and unremarkable to set itself. Generate five.
- Teaching. Ask a class to rank Jacksonville, Boston and San Francisco by size, then show them the census.
- Travel. Every city in the bottom half has a diner, a courthouse, and nobody writing about it.
Getting more out of the filters
- Entries read "City, ST", so Contains doubles as a state filter. Type TX for the Texan cities. For the Puerto Rican ones, type , PR with the comma, because a bare "pr" also matches Springfield.
- It is still a plain substring search on the name. Type ville, or burg, ton, field, and watch how American place names are assembled.
- Type New, North, South, East or West to find the cities named after a direction from somewhere else.
- Type San or Santa for the Spanish-named west, and Fort for where the army stopped.
- Starts with and Ends with compare a single character. Every entry now ends in a letter of a state code.
Questions people ask
Why is Jacksonville so big?
Because in 1968 it consolidated with Duval County, so its city limits are the county limits. That gives it about 874 square miles, the largest land area of any city in the contiguous United States.
What is the largest US city?
By city-proper population, New York. By land area in the contiguous states, Jacksonville. By metropolitan area, New York again. The answer changes with the boundary, and every published ranking picks one.
Are US city names unique?
Not remotely. There are five Springfields and three Columbuses among the largest thousand cities alone. A city is identified by its name and its state, and even then there are collisions.
How many cities are there in the United States?
There is no single answer, because municipal incorporation is governed by state law and every state sets its own thresholds. Some states have incorporated cities with a few dozen residents.
What does "city proper" mean?
The population inside the legal municipal boundary, as opposed to the urban area or the metropolitan area. It is the figure the census publishes, and it is the one that makes Jacksonville outrank Boston.
References
Skanda Aryal is a full stack engineer focused on accessible web experiences, with personal interests in time zones, travel, hiking, and geography. His enjoys playing with utilities tied to movement, schedules, places, and time based coordination. At Eon Tools, he reviews geography, transportation, times now, and date and time tools.