The words that fill station names: Street, Park, de and Shin

We split every typed station name into words and counted how many stations each word appears in, once per station. Branches that are drawn but not typed are left out. The result says a lot about how each city names its stops, and it tells you which words your fingers will learn first.

New York: Street and Avenue

Street appears in 220 of 433 New York names, just over half. Avenue is in 138, about a third. After that come Parkway (15), Road (13), Boulevard (13) and Park (11). New York names the stop after the cross street, so a long line is mostly numbers and the same two words. That is also why a New York line sometimes feels easier to type than its length suggests.

London: Park, Road and the points of the compass

In London the most common word is Park, in 20 of 214 stations, followed by Road (11), Green (8) and Street (8). The compass words South, North, West and East appear in six or seven each. London likes to name a station after the neighbourhood or the green space beside it.

Paris: de, Saint and Porte

Paris names are full of small French words. De is in 38 of 309 stations, Saint in 29, Porte in 20 and La in 16. Porte, meaning gate, marks the places where the old city walls once had gates, such as Porte Maillot and Porte d'Orléans. Saint appears in names like Saint-Lazare and Saint-Denis. Other common words are Pont (7), Mairie (town hall, 6) and Gare (station, 5).

Tokyo, Singapore and Seoul

In Tokyo the leaders are prefixes. Shin, meaning new, and Nishi, meaning west, each start 10 of 226 stations, and Higashi (east) starts seven. Minami (south) is next with four. In Singapore the pattern is local: Park appears five times and Bukit, the Malay word for hill, four, with Woodlands, Pasir, Tampines, Bedok, Tanjong and Tuas three times each.

Seoul is easiest to read from the last syllable, since Korean names often end in a word that says what the place is. Of 486 stations, 32 end in 산 (mountain), 15 in 동 (neighbourhood), 14 in 리 (village), 13 in 입구 (entrance) and 13 in 천 (stream). Nine end in 공원 (park) and six in 구청 (district office). In English, 17 of the names include University.

To see how this changes difficulty, read the difficulty ranking or the story about the longest names.