Cities

Name: Cities
Creator: GeoNames
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

34,149 cities of 15,000 people or more, grouped by state and country. Contains data from GeoNames (geonames.org), CC BY 4.0.

Provenance

Source: GeoNames
Effective version: cities15000 and admin1CodesASCII both 2026-09-24T01:53:22Z (Last-Modified; GeoNames publishes no version label)
Retrieved: 2026-09-23
Refresh cadence: Daily upstream; no archived versions, so dataset.json is the reproducible artefact
Licence: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0), both files. Changes made: cities15000 filtered and restructured by country and first-order division, joined to admin1CodesASCII for the division names. Read the licence
Attribution: Contains data from GeoNames (geonames.org) — cities15000 and admin1CodesASCII — CC BY 4.0, filtered and restructured by AutoSugges.

Field schema

37,156 items, across 3 hierarchy levels: country, state, city.

country: 244
state: 2,763
city: 34,149

Every field this dataset’s items carry
Field	Type	Meaning
value	string	The canonical, unique value — what a query resolves to.
displayValue	string	The locale-resolved label a suggestion renders.
description	string, optional	Free-text detail shown beside the item. NAICS uses it for the ancestor breadcrumb; not every dataset sets it.
parentSourceId	string, optional	The parent item in the source’s own key space, for a hierarchical dataset.
hierarchyLevel	string, optional	Which level of the hierarchy this item sits at.
displayOrder	integer	Curated display order, distinct from relevance rank (`DEC-LIST-004`).
aliases	string[]	Alternate spellings that resolve to this item at no extra runtime KV read (`DEC-ALIAS-001`).
metadata	object	Dataset-specific fields — e.g. NAICS’s `code`/`level`/`trilateral`, or a country’s `alpha2`/`alpha3`/`numeric`.

A worked item

{
  "value": "1138958",
  "displayValue": "Kabul",
  "description": "Kabul, Afghanistan",
  "aliases": [
    "Kabul"
  ],
  "metadata": {
    "geonameid": "1138958",
    "countryCode": "AF",
    "admin1Code": "13",
    "population": 4434550,
    "lat": 34.52813,
    "lon": 69.17233,
    "timezone": "Asia/Kabul"
  },
  "ancestors": [
    {
      "value": "AF",
      "displayValue": "Afghanistan"
    },
    {
      "value": "AF.13",
      "displayValue": "Kabul"
    }
  ]
}

Query it

/v1/query?key=YOUR_PUBLISHABLE_KEY&q=kabul

The publishable key above is a public, browser-safe identifier — never a secret.

Download

The licence above permits redistributing the compiled list as a file. Download Cities as JSON.

API reference: query