This is a cobbled together dataset of official U.S. city names and place names recognized by the U.S. Census Bureau. I originally used this in a spell checker for user input. The names were collected in multiple stages using the US Census API and later combined into one dataset. There are about more than 48,000 city and place names in this dataset. During the collection process, I learned that finding city names is not as straight forward as I thought. For example, some cities are "incorporated" and other areas that we think are cities, are actually considered "populated places".