Re: Chinatown
Since MWO dates the term to 1857, I'm going to guess that it was San Francisco. I can't think of another English speaking city that had a sizable Chinese population that early.
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The 1857 citation is in the OED and is a reference to Oroville, Calif. (a town north of Sacramento). From this I would gather that "Chinatown" was first used to describe a Chinese ghetto in mining or...
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The term was never restricted to cities. The earliest citation which I find immediately was published in 1852 and apparently refers to a visit to St. Helena (island) in 1845: it refers to a small...
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Barry Popik antedated OED's 1889 reference to San Francisco Chinatown -- he found an 1860 NY Times reference to the San Francisco...
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