Chicago’s name remembers a wild onion along a French canoe route
Chicago is Illinois’s largest city and America’s third, with 2.74 million residents in 2020 on Lake Michigan’s western shore. Incorporated in 1837 at a Great Lakes–Mississippi portage, it rebounded after the 1871 fire left more than 100,000 homeless. The name tracks Miami–Illinois šikaakwa, a wild onion or garlic.
Robert de La Salle’s circle recorded “Checagou”; a later traveler blamed garlic-thick forests for the label. Nicknames piled up: Windy City, Chi-Town, Second City, City of the Big Shoulders. Finance derivatives here generate about twenty percent of global commodities and financial futures volume; O’Hare ranks among top airports.
Nearly 57 million visitors came in 2025 for museums, beaches and restaurants, and the city has left its mark on improvisational comedy, jazz, blues, gospel and especially house music. By the mid-1700s the Potawatomi had succeeded the Miami, Sauk and Meskwaki in the area. The first known permanent settler, the trader Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, a man of African descent possibly born in Saint-Domingue, founded the settlement in the 1780s and is called the Founder of Chicago. In 1795 the Treaty of Greenville handed land for a US military post.
The metropolitan area holds about 9.62 million people, third in the nation, and the city is the seat of Cook County. Chicago shaped modern building through the Chicago School, the City Beautiful movement and the steel-framed skyscraper. Its regional economy ranked sixth in the world at over $919 billion in 2024, with no single industry employing more than 14 percent of workers, and it is the nation's railroad hub. Cultural anchors include the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Lyric Opera and the Art Institute, alongside the University of Chicago, Northwestern and the Barack Obama Presidential Center.
Source: Chicago
