>To this day, the city remains California’s third largest by land area.
This is largely beside the point of this, but the lack of clarity in words such as "largest" and "biggest" in this space bugs me. LA is so much bigger than NYC (size), NYC is so much larger than LA (population). You'll get various guides saying just one is for size, but I've seen both given.
It's a minor issue, but it's annoying in language.
As regions they are pretty similar population wise. At 100km radius (centring for maximimum population) LA is 18M people and NYC is 22M. It's clear why they are the cultural centres of the US. Chicago, Washington DC, and the Bay Area are next highest at ~10M each.
I’d wager that most people would assume “largest city” meant “largest city [by population]” because that’s clearly what search results assume. “Largest city in USA” first lists the Wikipedia entry for “List of United States Cities by Population” [0], with the next bunch of results assuming the same thing. For me, the 9th result is the first to mention land area.[1]
Jacksonville, Florida being the largest city has long been a trivia question that relies on this ambiguity. Based on the Wikipedia article, it looks like Anchorage is larger but maybe because it's a county equivalent, it's not considered a city in this context.
Chinese cities are not really "cities". They are closer to counties and in some instances like Chongqing, a literal province. The bigger cities are a administratively half a level above counties.
Ya, CQ is about the size of Maine, hardly just a city. Core urban CQ is only around 9.5 million people, which isn't that large by Chinese standards. Shanghai is much less rural at around 22-24 million people.
This is largely beside the point of this, but the lack of clarity in words such as "largest" and "biggest" in this space bugs me. LA is so much bigger than NYC (size), NYC is so much larger than LA (population). You'll get various guides saying just one is for size, but I've seen both given.
It's a minor issue, but it's annoying in language.