I asked myself the other day, “Are any city names so popular they’re in all 50 states?” With a little research and some UNIX magic (sort, uniq, regular expressions, etc.) I discovered that I was pretty wrong; there are no city names across all 50 states. However, the uniqueness of names makes for a nice distribution:
How to read this: There are 13,584 city names that are in only one state—unique in the nation. Similarly, 1638 city names are in two states, and so on. The y-axis is logarithmic.
At the far right, we see that there are two city names in 27 states(!), but none in all 50. The two winners? Clinton and Franklin.
