Word.ws English Dictionary

Emerald City

Emerald City proper noun: seattle (a city in Washington, United States).

Proper noun

the Emerald City

  1. (informal) Seattle (a city in Washington, United States).
    • The Emerald City, both famous and notorious for its clouds and rain, has been forced to institute a mandatory water conservation program for the first time "in memorable history."1987 August 4, “Seattle curbs watering”, in Deseret News

Origin of Emerald City

The Seattle Convention and Visitors Bureau held a contest in 1981 to find a new nickname for Seattle. The winning entry, "Emerald City", came from Sarah Sterling-Franklin of Carmel, California, whose submission described the city as "the jewel of the Northwest, the Queen of the Evergreen State, the many-faced city of space, elegance, magic and beauty." "Emerald City" is also a reference to the fictional capital of the Land of Oz in the book series by L. Frank Baum.

Questions about Emerald City

What does Emerald City mean?
Emerald City means seattle (a city in Washington, United States).
What part of speech is Emerald City?
Emerald City is a proper noun.

Words near Emerald City in the dictionary

  1. Emerado
  2. emerald
  3. emerald ash borer
  4. emerald ash borers
  5. Emerald Beach
  6. Emerald City
  7. emerald cockroach wasp
  8. emerald cockroach wasps
  9. emerald copper
  10. emerald cuckoo
  11. emerald cuckoos

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Emerald City (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “Emerald City.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/emerald_city. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.