How to Call People From Any State
You probably know a few government demonyms — words you call people or things from a particular state — for example, Pennsylvania, Texas, or Michigan fun. You may even know that Wikipedia has a list of semi-official government demonyms as well as alternatives. But did you know that government demonyms follow a regional model?
It turns out that states in the same region usually have the same suffix in their demon: the Old South and West Coast usually end in -ian, New England ends in -er, and the West ends in -an. ”In some random states,“ -ite ”is used. Regional patterns are shown in this map from Twitter’s OnlMaps :
These are just daemons recommended by the US government publishing house, so feel free to dispute them! At the Lifehacker office, we were somewhat skeptical about Wyoming. Isn’t this Wyoming? And outside of the city, New Yorkers like to call themselves “provincial” rather than “New Yorker”.
But it’s pretty cool that the people of Indiana are officially called “hooers.”