List of U.S. places named after non-U.S. places

There are many places in the United States that are named after places in another country. By far, the majority of the names came from immigrants naming their new home after their former home. As such, they reflect the pattern of immigration to the United States. Immigrants did not just settle in random locations, but rather congregated with others who spoke the same language and had the same religion. Three examples:

• An area in western Michigan centered on Holland in southern Ottawa County was settled by religious refugees from the Netherlands. After a split from the state church in the Netherlands, they were unhappy with the restrictions the Dutch government placed on their religious practices. There are several villages in that region named after villages in the old country.^[1]: 61
• A number of Belgian names are found clustered in the Green Bay area of northeastern Wisconsin. This reflects the high concentration of Belgian immigrants in that area.
• Ellis County, Kansas was the destination of a group of Volga Germans who moved there in the 1870s. Their settlements were mostly given the names of the villages they left behind in Russia.

Less concentrated groupings of foreign place names are Norwegian names throughout Minnesota, Czech names in southeast Texas, and Dutch names in the Hudson Valley of New York. The Hudson Valley locations are so named because the area was a Dutch colony before it became an English colony.

But not all the immigrants concentrated so heavily. Germans, for example, are one of the largest immigrant groups and places named after German cities are widespread across the United States. However, there is still a general concentration of them in the Midwestern United States, especially in Missouri.

Other sources of foreign names transferred to the U.S. are the Bible and ancient history. Biblically sourced names are widespread and are sometimes the result of naming a settlement after its church. Names from ancient history can also be found in a number of places, although a concentration of them can be found in upstate New York. Names from these two sources can be found in the Ancient World section below the list of countries.

Battle sites are also a source for foreign names. The Mexican–American War is the most common source, but other wars such as the Napoleonic Wars and World War I are also represented.

There is a small number of names whose origins do not fall into the above categories: some were given by railroad companies or taken from books the people naming the town had been reading. Names with yet other unusual sources include Madras, Oregon, which was named after a bolt of Madras cloth seen in the general store, and Poland, Maine, which was named after a medieval song that its first settler liked.

Not all towns whose names are the same as a foreign city or country are named after that city. For example, there is only one US place that is known to be named for the Boston in England. That is Boston, Massachusetts. The Bostons in Indiana, Missouri, New York, and Highland and Summit Counties in Ohio, as well as Boston Corner, New York and South Boston, Virginia are named after Boston, Massachusetts; those in Georgia and Texas are named after people; most other places with the name do not have a known etymology. Also note that places named after people are not on this list, even if that person's name can be traced back to a city. For this reason, cities such as New York, Baltimore, New Orleans, and Albuquerque are not on the list. Places named for people can be found at List of places in the United States named after people.

Some places have an indeterminate etymology, where it is known that they are named after a city in a particular country, but there is more than one place with that name and the etymology does not distinguish which one. These entries have "needs disambiguation" in their notes section.