worldCities

With more than 1,850,000 distinct cities and populated places (without duplicated records), classified by states (or regions, provinces, etc... depending on the country)* from 263 countries and territories, our worldCities databases are a perfect way to streamline the data entry on your websites or applications, without having to worry about name variants or mistakes.

Besides the US counties and some other countries' 2nd-level administrative divisions, the "Pro" version contains country names in up to 100 languages!

All data is encoded in UTF-8 and distributed in compressed text files, so you can load it into your favorite database.

Contact us to receive free sample data for the country or state of your choice, with absolutely no obligation!

worldCities files available for purchase

Name Delivery License Last update Price
(without updates)		 Price
(including 1-year updates)
worldCities LT - World download single April 29, 2010 € 99.99 EUR
 € 159.98 EUR
worldCities Standard - World download single April 29, 2010 € 179.99 EUR
 € 287.98 EUR
worldCities Pro - World download single April 29, 2010 € 289.99 EUR
 € 463.98 EUR
All of our databases include free unlimited e-mail support.

The default license includes the right to use the data on one (1) server (website, intranet...), and does not authorize redistribution or integration into products to be distributed (CMS, software application,...)

Please contact us if you need to use the data on multiple projects (discounts available), want redistributing rights or simply have questions about our License Agreement and the authorized uses.

worldCities database features

FeatureLTStandardPro
Cities and states names both with and without diacritics and special characters
Character mapping table, that details how character with diacritics and special characters are changed into non-diacritical ones
Code identifying the type of feature
(See feature type reference for more details.)
First-level administrative divisions (states, provinces, regions, etc... depending on the country)
Names in local language
(Not all names included in local writing system, but at least in their romanized form)
Names in conventionnal language (english)
(Not included for all cities and states records)
Language code associated to the feature name.
(Not included with all cities and states records in local language. See language reference for more details.)
FIPS country codes
ISO 3166-1 (alpha 2) country codes
Character set of the name
Second-level administrative divisions
(100% of US records classified in counties; majority of France, Greece, Italy, Spain and Serbia records classified in the 2nd level admin divisions.)
Names in foreign languages
(Some cities and states names are available in one or a few alternate languages. Most country names in 40 to 100 languages)
Latitude and longitude of all of "cities" records (decimal degrees)
Latitude and longitude of all of "cities" records (DMS: Degree/Minute/Second)
ISO 3166-1 (alpha 3) country codes
ISO 3166-1 numeric country codes
Continents, regions and subregions
(In multiple languages)
Internet top-level domains
ISO 4217 currency codes
(See currency reference for more details.)
Phone country codes
Free unlimited e-mail support

worldCities database structure

Having comprehensive and accurate data is good, but if it's not well structured, it might not be very useful. That's why not only worldCities, but all of our databases are structured in a very efficient way, which is a compromise between usability and database normalization (which do not always meet the same requirements). This results in very easy to use data, and the possibility to retrieve all the details for specific records with very simple and fast queries.

For easier maintenance, we also assigned a unique identification number to each feature. It is thus possible to store that number to refer to a particular feature, no matter the language used to display the name.

Click here to view the full structure of each table and detailed descriptions of their fields.

worldCities records statistics

Click here to view the number of records for each table, as well as the breakdowns by country.

Requirements and files information

The worldCities data is available in text files (tab delimited) encoded in Unicode (UTF-8). It can therefore be imported in virtually any database, including MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Oracle, etc... The only requirements are that you have enough free space on you hard drive to store the files and that you can import those files into your database.

For faster download, files are compressed in ZIP format.

* Not all of the cities have a corresponding state. Check the records statistics (link above) for detailed numbers for each country. When not classified at the state-level, the city/town/village records have the value of "00" as their state code. In many cases, you can discard those records without losing real usefulness. Note that some countries DO NOT have states/provinces (Aruba, for instance) and in those cases, "00" is also used as the state code.