Chicago
Americannoun
-
Judy Judy Cohen, born 1939, U.S. artist, author, and educator.
-
a city in NE Illinois, on Lake Michigan: second largest city in the U.S.
-
a river formed in Chicago that flows through downtown and, as engineered, to the Des Plaines River: part of the Illinois Waterway.
noun
Discover More
Carl Sandburg, in his poem “Chicago,” called the city the “Hog Butcher for the World” because of Chicago's heavy involvement in the meatpacking industry.
During the time of Prohibition, Chicago was controlled by gangsters, Al Capone being the most notorious. Gangster warfare continued long after this particularly violent period.
Originally called the “Windy City” because the city bragged about the 1893 World Expo that was held there. The term has since come to refer to the strong northern winds that blow off the lake in the winter.
Chicago's downtown is referred to as the “Loop” because it is enclosed by elevated railways, called the “El.”
For many years the second largest city in the United States, before being displaced by Los Angeles, and therefore referred to as the “Second City.”
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Fink and Koh met on the first day of their freshman year at Lake Forest Academy in the Chicago suburbs.
She began by reading a poem about Chicago, one about trains, and then another about Abraham Lincoln.
From Literature
![]()
A Chicago native, Runyon made her television debut as Sally Frame in the long-running soap opera “Another World.”
From Los Angeles Times
Reporters also conducted interviews with current and former federal prosecutors in Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Chicago and Washington, D.C., as well as defense attorneys and legal experts.
In November, a video of Border Patrol agents dragging a woman out of her car in Chicago flooded social media.
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.