Cincinnati ( SIN sin AT ee; colloquially nicknamed Cincy) is the most populous city in Hamilton County, Ohio, United States, and its county seat. It is located along the Ohio River across from its confluence with the Licking River in Kentucky. Cincinnati is the third most populous city in Ohio (after Columbus and Cleveland), and the 66th most populous city in the U.S., with a population of 309,317 at the 2020 census. The city serves as the economic and cultural hub of the tri state Cincinnati metropolitan area, Ohio’s most populous metropolitan area and the nation’s 30th largest, at over 2.3 million residents.
At a Glance
- County: Hamilton County
- County seat of Hamilton County
- State: Ohio
History of Cincinnati
Two years after the founding of the settlement then known as "Losantiville", Arthur St. Clair, the governor of the Northwest Territory, changed its name to "Cincinnati", possibly at the suggestion of the surveyor Israel Ludlow. The name was chosen in honor of the Society of the Cincinnati, made up of Continental Army officers of the Revolutionary War, of which St. Clair was then president. The society, in turn, was named for Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, a dictator of the early Roman Republic who saved Rome from a crisis and then retired to farming because he did not want to remain in power, becoming a symbol of Roman civic virtue.
Cincinnati has many nicknames, including Cincy (or Cinci), the Queen City or Queen City of the West, the Blue Chip City, the City of Seven Hills, and Porkopolis. The traditional Queen City nickname is taken from an 1819 newspaper article and further immortalized by the 1854 poem "Catawba Wine". In it, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote of the city:
Text adapted from the Wikipedia article Cincinnati, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.