Mexico City

The Mexica people founded their island city of Tenochtitlan in 1325, guided by the sign their god Huitzilopochtli had promised: an eagle perched on a cactus growing from a rock in the middle of a lake. The city they built became the largest in the Americas by 1500, with an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 inhabitants. But the name Mexico, which the Spanish heard from the Mexica themselves, predated the city and referred to the broader territory the Mexica people claimed as their homeland. Nahuatl scribes used the glyph for Mexihco in documents before Tenochtitlan was founded.

Nahuatl scholars have proposed three competing etymologies for Mexihco. One reading parses it as Metztli (moon) plus xictli (navel or center) plus co (place suffix), yielding place at the navel of the moon. A second connects Mexi to mexitl, either the maguey plant or an early name for the god Huitzilopochtli himself. A third traces the root to a place name from Aztlan, the Mexica's legendary homeland in northwestern Mexico. Alonso de Molina, the Franciscan friar who compiled the first Nahuatl dictionary in 1555, recorded all the variants without settling on one, and the question remains open.

Hernan Cortes and his Tlaxcalan allies besieged and captured Tenochtitlan in August 1521 after eighty days of fighting. Cortes wrote to King Charles I of Spain calling the new settlement Mexico, and the Crown formalized the name as Mexico-Tenochtitlan in early colonial documents. The Spanish rebuilt the city on the ruins of Tenochtitlan's causeways and canals, draining the lake to support the growing colonial capital. By 1600 it was the largest city in the Americas, with more than 100,000 residents, a population that no European city matched until the 18th century.

Mexican independence from Spain in 1821 made the capital Ciudad de Mexico, city of Mexico, a name that distinguishes the settlement from the nation bearing the same word. English speakers added City to solve the same confusion. A 2016 constitutional reform elevated Ciudad de Mexico from a federal district to a full constituent state, giving it legislative powers it had never held before. Today the greater metropolitan area holds 22 million people, making it one of the five largest urban centers on earth, all of them living inside a name at least 700 years old.