City Paper dug into the question of Washington, D.C.’s name and found out Washington, D.C. isn’t the name of our fair city after all.

Colloquially, people began referring to the new city as “New Washington.” But officially? … According to Cynthia Brock-Smith, secretary of the District of Columbia, the 1871 act referred only to the District of Columbia, and so that is the official name of the jurisdiction. (The District seal adopted in that year, bearing just the words “District of Columbia” and “Justitia Omnibus,” remains the city’s seal to this day.) “We refer to it as Washington, D.C., but the legal name is the District of Columbia,” Brock-Smith says. “We can’t find anything that officially says ‘Washington, D.C.’ in our records.”

Full article here.

h/t Byron Tau