Los Angeles ( Los Santos )

## Los Angles

Lossantos skyline (1).webp

lit. 'The Angels'), often referred to by its initials **L.A.**, is the largest city in California, the most populous U.S. state. It is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Southern California. Los Angeles is the second-most populous city in the United States after New York City, with a population of roughly 3.9 million residents within the city limits as of 2020. Los Angeles has a Mediterranean climate, an ethnically and culturally diverse population, and a sprawling metropolitan area. It is perhaps best known as the home of the Hollywood film industry.

The majority of the city proper lies in a basin in Southern California adjacent to the Pacific Ocean in the west and extending partly through the Santa Monica Mountains and north into the San Fernando Valley, with the city bordering the San Gabriel Valley to its east. It covers about 469 square miles (1,210 km2), and is the county seat of Los Angeles County, which is the most populous county in the United States with an estimated 9.86 million residents as of 2022. It is the third-most visited city in the U.S. after New York City and Miami with over 4.6 million visitors as of 2019.

The area that became Los Angeles was originally inhabited by the indigenous Tongva people and later claimed by Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo for Spain in 1542. The city was founded on September 4, 1781, under Spanish governor Felipe de Neve, on the village of Yaanga. It became a part of Mexico in 1821 following the Mexican War of Independence. In 1848, at the end of the Mexican–American War, Los Angeles and the rest of California were purchased as part of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and became part of the United States. Los Angeles was incorporated as a municipality on April 4, 1850, five months before California achieved statehood. The discovery of oil in the 1890s brought rapid growth to the city. The city was further expanded with the completion of the Los Angeles Aqueduct in 1913, which delivers water from Eastern California.

Los Angeles has a diverse economy with a broad range of industries. It has one of the busiest container ports in the Americas. In 2018, the Los Angeles metropolitan area had a gross metropolitan product of over $1.0 trillion, making it the city with the third-largest GDP in the world, after New York City and Tokyo. Los Angeles hosted the 1932 and 1984 Summer Olympics and will host the 2028 Summer Olympics. More recently, statewide droughts in California have strained both the city's and Los Angeles County's water security.

## Name

The local English pronunciation of the name of the city has varied over time. A 1953 article in the journal of the American Name Society asserts that the pronunciation /lɔːs ˈændʒələs/ *lawss AN-jəl-əs* was established following the 1850 incorporation of the city and that since the 1880s the pronunciation /loʊs ˈæŋɡələs/ *lohss ANG-gəl-əs* emerged from a trend in California to give places Spanish, or Spanish-sounding, names and pronunciations. In 1908, librarian Charles Fletcher Lummis, who argued for the name's pronunciation with a hard *g* (/ɡ/), reported that there were at least 12 pronunciation variants. In the early 1900s, the *Los Angeles Times* advocated for pronouncing it *Loce AHNG-hayl-ais* (/loʊs ˈɑːŋheɪleɪs/), approximating Spanish [los ˈaŋxeles], by printing the respelling under its masthead for several years. This did not find favor.

Since the 1930s, /lɔːs ˈændʒələs/ has been most common. In 1934, the United States Board on Geographic Names decreed that this pronunciation be used. This was also endorsed in 1952 by a "jury" appointed by Mayor Fletcher Bowron to devise an official pronunciation.

Common pronunciations in the United Kingdom include /lɒs ˈændʒɪliːz, -lɪz, -lɪs/ *loss AN-jil-eez, -⁠iz, -⁠iss*. Phonetician Jack Windsor Lewis described the most common one, /lɒs ˈændʒɪliːz/ (listen), as a spelling pronunciation based on analogy to Greek words ending in *-‍es*, "reflecting a time when the classics were familiar if Spanish was not".