Global Cities Gazetteer (GeoNames, pop ≥ 1,000)
Every populated place on Earth with population ≥ 1,000 - ~150k cities and towns - in one clean, geocoded table. GeoNames ships it as a header-less tab-delimited dump; we parse it to a tidy row per place: name (+ ASCII), country, admin-1/2 codes, population, elevation, timezone and lat/lon. The universal populated-place join key (name ⋈ country ⋈ coordinates) that geocodes or enriches any geo dataset. CC-BY 4.0.
- Source
- GeoNames
- Licence
- Redistributable open data
- Quality
- QC clean · 0 failures
- Format
- Apache Parquet + dictionary
Safe to train on
Built only from a named, redistributable official source under a documented open licence - not scraped web data. No copyright grey zone, no personal data. Ships machine-readable Croissant metadata (ML Commons - loads in Hugging Face / Kaggle / Google), an AI training-licence manifest documenting source, licence and provenance for your model's data governance, and a machine-readable data dictionary (drop it into an agent / RAG prompt so the model knows every column) - all inspectable before you buy.
What's included
- ~150k populated places worldwide (pop ≥ 1,000) - one clean, geocoded row each
- Name + ASCII name, ISO country, admin-1/2 codes, population, elevation, timezone, lat/lon
- The universal city join key - geocode or enrich any place-keyed dataset
- Places, not people - no PII
- CC-BY 4.0 (GeoNames) - free commercial reuse & redistribution with attribution
- Source: GeoNames (geonames.org), CC-BY 4.0
Schema
| Column | Type | Description | Filled | Distinct |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| geonameid | int | GeoNames id (primary key) | 100.0% | 170,359 |
| name | str | Place name | 100.0% | 150,013 |
| ascii_name | str | ASCII place name | 100.0% | 148,971 |
| country | str | ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code | 100.0% | 245 |
| admin1 | str | Admin-1 (state/region) code | 99.9% | 666 |
| admin2 | str | Admin-2 (county/district) code | 87.3% | 20,869 |
| population | int | Population | 100.0% | 40,360 |
| elevation_m | float | Elevation (metres; GeoNames elevation, else DEM) | 100.0% | 3,727 |
| timezone | str | IANA timezone | 100.0% | 392 |
| feature_code | str | GeoNames feature code (PPL, PPLA, PPLC, …) | 100.0% | 18 |
| latitude | float | Latitude | 100.0% | 157,709 |
| longitude | float | Longitude | 100.0% | 161,063 |
Sample & preview
Every purchase ships as Apache Parquet with a data dictionary and the full QC report. A free sample (first rows + schema) is downloadable here - confirm fit before you buy. Source: GeoNames (redistributable open data; attribution passes through - see our Licence).
Don't trust screenshots - drop the sample into your notebook right now.
import pandas as pd df = pd.read_parquet("global-cities-gazetteer_sample.parquet") df.info() # typed columns, gap-aware, ready to join⬇ Download free Parquet sample or CSV for Excel
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