Usually when people talk about "larger", they mean population. If you are talking specifically about geographical area, sure, but it's usually explicitly named. If you compared the metro area of Mpls to Albuquerque, I bet it's way larger geographically as well. So really my point is that when someone says somewhere is a big city, they don't mean the central city, but rather the metro area. The population or geographical size of the central city has little to do with what it's like to live in or visit a metro area, in terms of cultural variety, economy, and so on.

Oh, this was a joke? That was unclear. However, now that you've clarified, it remains unfunny. appreciate the effort, though.

I shouldn't have posted such an inflammatory comment, sorry!

However, having lived in the UK most of my life and having worked in various logistics and adjacent software businesses, I can promise you that wiki page is totally meaningless for almost all real world uses of the word "city".

The problem is it's a dumb historical definition if you go by what that wiki page suggests are cities. That old school royal city status in the UK is a royal honour, not a population threshold or any other useful definitely. It was historically tied to having an Anglican cathedral, which is why Wells (~10,000 people) and St Davids (~2,000) are cities but massive 200,000-person places aren't.

Some of the most glaring offenders (Milton Keynes, Doncaster, Southend, Colchester) finally got status in the 2022 Platinum Jubilee round, but plenty remain. Here are the biggest UK built-up areas that are obviously cities by any normal definition but lack the title:

Northampton (~244,000) Luton (~234,000) Reading (~204,000) 150,000–200,000: Bournemouth (~196,000) Bolton (~184,000) Swindon (~184,000) Warrington (~175,000) Slough (~167,000) Telford (~157,000) Ipswich (~152,000) 100,000–150,000: Blackpool, Middlesbrough, Huddersfield, Poole, Blackburn, Crawley, Stockport, Basildon, Cheltenham, Gateshead, Birkenhead, Maidstone, Solihull, West Bromwich

That's why using the EU definition of a city makes much more sense and makes things actually consistent Europe-wide, is what you'd use in any business / logistics application etc, so that dumb royal definition annoys me 😅 I'm also generally pretty anti monarchy (I'm Scottish) so that probably contributes to how salty I am!