Los Angeles
Toponymy

On September 4, 1781, a group of 44 settlers known as " Los Pobladores " founded the pueblo (town) they called El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles, ' The Town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels '. The original name of the settlement is disputed; the Guinness Book of World Records rendered it as "El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles de Porciúncula "; other sources have shortened or alternate versions of the longer name.

The local English pronunciation of the name of the city has varied over time. A 1953 article in the journal of the American Name Society asserts that the pronunciation / l ɔː s ˈ æ n dʒ əl ə s / lawss AN -jəl-əs was established following the 1850 incorporation of the city and that since the 1880s the pronunciation / l oʊ s ˈ æ ŋ ɡ əl ə s / lohss ANG -gəl-əs emerged from a trend in California to give places Spanish, or Spanish-sounding, names and pronunciations. In 1908, librarian Charles Fletcher Lummis, who argued for the name's pronunciation with a hard g (/ ɡ /), reported that there were at least 12 pronunciation variants. In the early 1900s, the Los Angeles Times advocated for pronouncing it Loce AHNG-hayl-ais (/ l oʊ s ˈ ɑː ŋ h eɪ l eɪ s /), approximating Spanish, by printing the respelling under its masthead for several years. This did not find favor.

Since the 1930s, / l ɔː s ˈ æ n dʒ əl ə s / has been most common. In 1934, the United States Board on Geographic Names decreed that this pronunciation be used by the federal government. This was also endorsed in 1952 by a "jury" appointed by Mayor Fletcher Bowron to devise an official pronunciation.

Common pronunciations in the United Kingdom include / l ɒ s ˈ æ n dʒ ɪ l iː z, - l ɪ z, - l ɪ s / loss AN -jil-eez, - iz, - iss. Phonetician Jack Windsor Lewis described the most common one, / l ɒ s ˈ æ n dʒ ɪ l iː z /, as a spelling pronunciation based on analogy to Greek words ending in - es, "reflecting a time when the classics were familiar if Spanish was not".
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