List of nicknames for Chicago

• "Mud City" – possibly the oldest nickname for the city, referring to the fact that the terrain of the city used to be a mud flat
• "Windy City" – origins of this name are disputed; see Windy City
• "Chi-Town" – also used for the hockey teams Chi-Town Shooters and Chi-Town Shamrocks
• "Second City" – by one possible etymology, this refers to the fact that Chicago had the second-largest metropolitan area in the United States from 1889 to 1984 ; it can also refer to the rebuilding of the city between the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 and the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893
• "City of Big Shoulders" – taken from the fifth line of Carl Sandburg's poem "Chicago". Also sometimes said as "City of Broad Shoulders".
• "City by the Lake" – used as early as the 1890s
• "City in a Garden" – English translation of the Latin motto on the city seal: Urbs in Horto
• "The City that Works" – slogan from Richard J. Daley's tenure as Mayor, describing Chicago as a blue-collar, hard-working city, which ran relatively smoothly
• "Great Commercial Tree" – from the State Anthem of Illinois
• "Heart of America" – Chicago is one of the largest transportation centers in America, and its location was once near the center of the United States
• "The Great American City" – taken from Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Norman Mailer's book Miami and the Siege of Chicago : "Chicago is the great American city... perhaps of the great American cities"; "the notion that Chicago is arguably the most quintessential American city" was central to Robert J. Sampson's landmark research on communities, criminology, and urban sociology, Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect
• "My Kind of Town" – from the song "My Kind of Town " which was popularized by Frank Sinatra in the film Robin and the Seven Hoods, about a fictional popular Chicago gangster
• "The City Beautiful" – reference to the reform movement sparked by the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, used by Hawk Harrelson when the Chicago White Sox open a game at U.S. Cellular Field
• "Chi-beria" – a play on Siberia, a nickname largely used during the 2014 North American Cold Wave
• "Chiraq" or "Chi-Raq" – controversial combination of Chicago and Iraq to compare Chicago's high crime rates to the situation of war-torn Iraq; Spike Lee's 2015 film Chi-Raq uses it as the title; considered offensive, sensationalist, and degrading by many residents of the Chicago area
• "The 312" – reference to the area code used exclusively in The Loop, seen on AT&T ads in the city
• "Shitcago" – pejorative nickname sometimes used by residents of downstate Illinois in resentment at the wealth and power of the city in relation to the remainder of the state; in a political sense, this stems from the city being the political base of the Democratic Party in Illinois, in contrast to the Republican-dominated rural areas