Nicknames of Chicago
This article lists nicknames for the city of Chicago, Illinois. Windy City Second City "Second City" originates as an insult from a series of articles in The New Yorker by A. J. Liebling, later combined into a book titled Chicago: The Second City (1952). In it, Liebling writes about his hatred for Chicago and contrasts it to his hometown New York City. He complains about Chicago's economic decline, rampant organized crime and political corruption, declining population, outdated schools of thought, and general dependency on the cities along the east coast. The Chicago-based improv comedy group The Second City references Liebling's book in their self-mocking name. In 2011, Chicago announced its adoption of the slogan "Second to None", a protest stance indirectly referring to Liebling's publications. The slogan was replaced with another in 2022. An etymology popularized by tour guides suggests that it refers to rebuilding the city following the Great Chicago Fire in 1871. Chi-town "Chi-town," "Chi-Town," or "Chitown" ( ) is a nickname that follows an established pattern of shortening a city's name and appending the suffix "-town," like "H-Town" refers to Houston. Despite many mentions by well-known figures in popular works, such as C. W. McCall's song "Convoy," its popularity as a nickname used by locals is disputed. Wendy McClure wrote in the Chicago Reader in 2017 that it is the "cilantro of nicknames": its distastefulness depends on who is using it. Events and organizations often use the nickname, for example, the hockey team Chi-Town Shooters, the WCW event Chi-Town Rumble, and the New Year's Eve event Chi-Town Rising. City of Big Shoulders "City of Big Shoulders" is a nickname coined by Carl Sandburg in his 1914 poem "Chicago," which describes the city as "stormy, husky, [and] brawling." It is the last of several nicknames in the poem; the others hint at the cities major industrial activities, for example, the meat-packing industry and railroad industry. It is also sometimes said as the "City of Broad Shoulders." Chiberia "Chiberia"a portmanteau of "Chicago" and "Siberia" was coined by Richard Castro, a meteorologist working for CBS Chicago, during a cold wave in 2014 that brought the coldest temperatures to the city in multiple decades. The National Weather Service used the hashtag "#Chiberia" during its reporting on the cold wave. The nickname continues to be used during cold weather events, for example in 2017 and in 2019. Chiraq "Chiraq"a portmanteau of "Chicago" and "Iraq"controversially compares the city (given its crime rates) to war-torn Iraq. Chuck Goudie, a reporter for ABC7 Chicago, asserted that the nickname is based on a Iraq War statistic: from 2003 to 2012, 4,265 people were killed in Chicago, nearly equal to the number of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq in the same period. The origin of the nickname is not definitive, but it saw increasing popularity in usage around the end of the Iraq War. For example, Spike Lee used the nickname as the title of his 2015 film, Lil Reese used it in his 2013 song "Traffic,"