How did Cincinnati get its name?

Cincinnati is named, at two removes, after a Roman with curly hair. Before that, it had a name assembled from syllables of several languages.

The town was settled in 1788 on the north bank of the Ohio River, though Etymonline gives 1789. Its first name, Losantiville, was the work of the surveyor John Filson. He built it in pieces: L for the Licking River, os for the Latin "mouth," anti for the Greek "opposite," and ville for "town." Put together, it was meant to say "the town opposite the mouth of the Licking."

It did not last. On 4 January 1790 the territorial governor, Arthur St. Clair, changed the name to Cincinnati. The American Name Society says St. Clair simply did not like Losantiville.

St. Clair was a member of the Society of the Cincinnati. Continental Army officers founded the society on 13 May 1783 at Fishkill, New York. George Washington served as its first President General from December 1783 until his death in 1799.

The society took its name from Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, a Roman hero of the 5th century BC. In the traditional story he was plowing his small farm when Rome called on him to lead its army. He defeated the enemy within fifteen days and went straight back to his plow. The society's motto praises exactly that: "He relinquished everything to serve the Republic."

Cincinnatus itself was a cognomen, an extra name, within the Quinctius clan, as Etymonline explains. It means "with curly hair," from the Latin cincinnus, "curl."

The city later picked up nicknames too. By tradition an 1819 newspaper article first called Cincinnati the Queen City, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1854 poem "Catawba Wine" helped spread it. Its booming pork trade earned it a less regal nickname, Porkopolis.