Pittsburgh
40.4417°N -80.0000°W · Q1342
2 English words in this atlas trace back to Pittsburgh. It sits in United States.
The name was invented by newspapers rather than linguists, and it turned an accent into a souvenir.
Pittsburgh papers had printed lists of local words since at least 1910, and the label Pittsburghese was in use by the 1960s, when the lists became a regular feature. Linguists call the variety Western Pennsylvania English; yinz descends from the Scots-Irish you ones, and redd up from a Scots verb meaning to tidy. The name now sells mugs and T-shirts as much as it describes speech.
A city was insulted so publicly that its own newspapers would print only the rhyme.
The name substitutes a taboo syllable for Pitts, and Wiktionary records both the Pittsburgh sense and a generic one for any run-down town. It reached a national audience in October 2006, when the actress Sienna Miller, then filming The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, used it of the city in a Rolling Stone interview; local papers reported the remark as a profane word that rhymes with Pittsburgh, and Miller apologized within days. Urban Dictionary entries from 2009 onward all gloss it as Pittsburgh, one of them calling it the name used by anyone not from there.