Los Angeles

On August 2, 1769, Gaspar de Portolá and his expedition camped beside a river in southern California and named it for the feast day they were observing: Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles de Porciúncula. The Porziuncola is a chapel near Assisi, Italy, where Francis of Assisi rebuilt a small church dedicated to Mary in 1216, and the feast of Our Lady of the Angels was observed there each August 2. The name was festive, not intended to stick to a California river. Twelve years later, on September 4, 1781, Governor Felipe de Neve founded a pueblo on that same river and inherited the name in shortened form: El Pueblo de los Ángeles.

Angeles is Spanish for angels, and the word traces back through Latin angelus to Greek ángelos, which originally meant messenger or envoy in Homer's time. Greek writers used ángelos to describe human couriers carrying dispatches between cities. When Jewish scholars in Alexandria translated the Hebrew scriptures into Greek in the 3rd century BCE, they chose ángelos to render the Hebrew mal'akh, meaning divine messenger. Augustine of Hippo wrote in 415 CE that the term names a function rather than a nature: they are called angels because of what they do, not what they essentially are.

American forces took California from Mexico in 1847, and the city's Spanish name immediately became a problem for English-speaking administrators. Newspapers began printing Los Angeles without accent marks, and land speculators promoted the region in pamphlets that shortened and anglicized everything they could. The transcontinental railroad reached Los Angeles in 1876, and the population grew from 11,000 in 1880 to 102,000 by 1900. The full ceremonial pueblo name, forty-four words in its most elaborate form, survived only in legal documents and anniversary speeches.

By 1930 Los Angeles was the fifth-largest city in the United States, and its name had contracted in daily speech to L.A. The angels of the Porziuncola gave way to the film industry, the freeway, and the abbreviation. American usage dropped the diacritics early and kept the compression. Today the greater metropolitan area holds 13 million people, more than live in Greece or Portugal, a scale that the expedition of 1769 could not have forecast from a single night beside the river.