Detroit ( ) (d'Étroit, meaning "at the strait" , ) is the largest city in the U.S. state of Michigan and the seat of Wayne County. Detroit is a major port city on the Detroit River, in the Midwest region of the United States. Located north of Windsor, Ontario Detroit is a geographical oddity as the only U.S. city that looks south to Canada. It was founded in 1701 by the Frenchman Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac.
It is known as the world's traditional automotive center — "Detroit" is a metonym for the American automobile industry — and an important source of popular music, legacies celebrated by the city's two familiar nicknames, Motor City and Motown. Other nicknames emerged in the twentieth century, including Rock City, Arsenal of Democracy (during World War II), The D, D-Town, and The 3-1-3 (its area code).
In 2006, Detroit ranked as the United States' eleventh most populous city, with 918,849 residents. At its peak, the city was the fourth largest in the country, but it has rapidly declined in population since the 1960s. The name Detroit sometimes refers to the Metro Detroit area, a sprawling region with a population of 4,468,966 for the Metropolitan Statistical Area, making it the nation's tenth-largest, and a population of 5,410,014 for the nine-county Combined Statistical Area as of the 2006 Census Bureau estimates. The Windsor-Detroit area, a critical commercial link straddling the Canada-U.S. border, has a total population of about 5,900,000.
