Detroit (pronounced /dɪˈtrɔɪt/) (French: Détroit, meaning "strait"[5], pronounced Detroit.ogg [detʁwa] (help·info)) is the largest city in the U.S. state of Michigan and the seat of Wayne County. Detroit is a major port city on the Detroit River, in the Midwest region of the United States. Located north of Windsor, Ontario, Detroit is the only major[6] U.S. city that looks south to Canada. It was founded on July 24, 1701 by the Frenchman Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac.
It is known as the world's traditional automotive center—"Detroit" is a metonym for the American automobile industry—and an important source of popular music, legacies celebrated by the city's two familiar nicknames, The Motor City and Motown.[7][8] Other nicknames emerged in the twentieth century, including Rock City, Arsenal of Democracy (during World War II),[9] The D, D-Town, Hockeytown, and The 3-1-3 (its telephone area code).[10]
In 2008, Detroit ranked as the United States' eleventh most populous city, with 987,956 residents.[11] At its peak in 1950 the city was the fourth largest in America with 1.8 million people, but has since seen a major shift in its population to the suburbs.
The name Detroit sometimes refers to the Metro Detroit area, a sprawling region with a population of 4,467,592[12] for the Metropolitan Statistical Area, making it the nation's eleventh-largest, and a population of 5,405,918[13] for the nine-county Combined Statistical Area as of the 2007 Census Bureau estimates. The Detroit-Windsor area, a critical commercial link straddling the Canada-U.S. border, has a total population of about 5,700,000.[14]