With a 2020 population of 39,306, this is going to be the population winner among three letter city names.
And Jay, Florida! Both of my college roommates were from North Florida so I’ve actually been there, population about 500
Several three-letter “cities” in Illinois, all of them better described as very small towns:
- Ava (population 553)
- Dix (469)
- Ina (1641)
- Joy (372)
- Lee (313)
- Rio (209)
Gap, PA. A town in the vicinity of Intercourse.
The shortest named community in America was Y, Alaska. But they renamed it Susitna North in 2010.
Kentucky has Oz but it’s so small that I’m having trouble finding its population figure. Or on a map, for that matter; Google says it’s somewhere in here:
As well as the winner for any population when you also add the full name of the state.
@Telemark I didn’t know about Jay VT.
And Rye, NY looks like a possible winner: The population was 45,928 at the 2010 census. Rye (town), New York - Wikipedia
I don’t know why I didn’t think of it. I’ve been to Jay NY just twice, but I’ve driven/ridden through Rye NY at least a hundred times, and been to Rye Playland many times.
Coincidentally, John Jay, for whom Jay VT and Jay NY are both named, came from Rye.
I went to Roy, Utah on business in the 90s. Remember IOmega disc drives?
Like Ely, Zim is in northern Minnesota, but alas is unincorporated. I’ve been there; it takes just a few seconds to go through the place.
I’ve been there. It’s close to Hill AFB. There’s a notable strip club there where presumably the Air Force went to blow off steam. Except, this being Utah, the stripper couldn’t strip down below what was basically a bikini. And they couldn’t serve anything stronger than 3.2 beer. . But I suppose it was better than nothing. More sinful pleasures were available a two hour drive across the Salt Lake Desert in Wendover, Nevada, where you could gamble and get real drinks.
Roy OR
Not the biggest by a long shot. I bicycle through it from time to time. The only buildings that are not a house or barn are a Catholic church and school. But it does have the interesting feature that its name+state abbrev is a palindrome. It’s not the only place with that feature: there’s a short list of them here:
There are other two-letter places besides the ones name Ai. Not very many but I do remember there’s a place named Ed KY. And of course Wikipedia has a list of them:
Is that pronounced 'I (or ‘Eye’ or ‘Aye’? Or is it pronounced ‘Eye-eeeeeeeee!’
Do the Spanish residents call it ‘Ojo’?
And is the population slothful?
There’s always the birthplace of Amway, Ada, MI
There is also Ada, OK.
I’m familiar with it because it has (maybe had) a large AT&T network switch. The naming convention was <city name reduced to 4 characters><5 characters for switch type>.
So, Minneapolis would be MPLSMN, Kansas City KSCYMO (or KSCYKS).
Ada being three characters ended up with a space in the name, which caused problems for parsing in computer programs, depending on the operating system/language/etc.
I presume the other listed cities had similar issues, but ‘ADA OK’ was the one used for pointing out it needed to be handled as a test case (possibly because it was first alphabetically?).
Well now I want to start a community and name it Kroywen.
Maybe we should ask an Artificial Intelligence… (Actually, I believe Ai is a Biblical reference.)
That’d add to the short list of places named with the reverse of the state they’re in: Adaven, Nevada (ghost town) and Saxet, Texas (former town in Shelby County). And perhaps Aksarben, Nebraska, a mixed use development in Omaha; used to be a horse race track with the same name.
There’s also three places in Canada named Adanac.
Correct.