Pacific Northwest

American  

[puh-sif-ik nawrth-west] / pəˈsɪf ɪk ˌnɔrθˈwɛst /

noun

1. an imprecisely defined region of North America that is commonly held to include the U.S. states of Oregon, Washington, and Idaho and the Canadian province of British Columbia, with some designations extending the region south into northern California and/or north into Alaska and Yukon: often considered as much a historical, sociocultural region as a geographical one. PNW

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Pacific Northwest British  

noun

1. the region of North America lying north of the Columbia River and west of the Rockies

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Example Sentences

See Examples For:

Pacific Northwest

To begin, we are in some mountainous slice of small-town Pacific Northwest, where the Canadian tax breaks call American producers across the 49th parallel and the landscape presses in from all sides.

From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 19, 2026

Canada’s and America’s regional and even ethnic identities map neatly onto one another, from the Pacific Northwest and the Great Plains to the Atlantic provinces and New England.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 2, 2026

The Juan de Fuca plate is being forced beneath the North American plate, creating the Cascadia subduction zone along the Pacific Northwest.

From Science Daily ● Aug. 30, 2026

Smoke and fires are a normal occurrence here in the US Pacific Northwest every summer, as residents wait for the autumn rains to arrive.

From BBC ● Aug. 8, 2026

According to Fenn, “the great preponderance of the evidence” indicates that the Shoshone also transmitted smallpox down the Columbia River into the Pacific Northwest.

From "1491" by Charles C. Mann

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