200 Largest Cities in the World

How to use 200 Largest Cities

The page opens on the full ranking, largest first. Three ways through it: Scroll the ranking if you want the shape of the list — who is at the top, who sits at 50, what falls off at 200. Search by name if you already know the city. Typing the first few letters narrows the list as you go.

Open a city to leave the ranking behind and get that city's own page: its clock, its position, its neighbours. Rank numbers are stable within a single edition of the list, so a city you bookmarked at number 34 stays at 34 until the list is next rebuilt.

What "largest" is measuring

City size is not one number, and this is the part that surprises people. A city can be counted three ways, and the three answers can differ by a factor of five for the same place: City proper — the population inside the administrative boundary. Sharp edges, but the boundary is a legal artefact and may have been drawn a century ago.

Urban area — the continuously built-up zone, ignoring where one municipality ends and the next begins. Metropolitan area — the built-up core plus the surrounding territory that commutes into it. This is why two perfectly honest lists can disagree about which city is largest. Neither is wrong; they are answering different questions. When you compare a rank here against a rank elsewhere, check which of the three the other list used before concluding that one of them is broken.

A city's boundary is a line drawn by administrators; a city's population is a crowd that ignores lines. The ranking is an argument between the two.

Reading a ranking without being fooled by it

Ranked lists invite a kind of false precision. Positions near the top are widely reported and hard to dispute. Positions in the middle are much closer together — the gap between rank 90 and rank 110 can be smaller than the uncertainty in either figure. Treat neighbouring ranks as roughly tied rather than firmly ordered.

The same caution applies to movement. A city that "jumped twenty places" has often not grown at all; the definition changed, or a suburb was absorbed, or a new count replaced an old estimate. Real growth is slow and shows up over years, not between editions of a list.

Where the list goes next

The ranking is a hub, not a destination. Each city entry is a doorway: The local clock, for when you need to know whether it is a reasonable hour to call. Coordinates, for anything that needs a position rather than a name.

Distance to any other city on the list, measured along the curve of the Earth. Most people arrive here on the way to something else — planning a call, checking a flight, settling a dispute about whether one city is bigger than another. The ranking is the index; the city pages are the content.