[AccessD] Useful Lists

On the basis of the thread about airport lists, I proposed to Jim Lawrence that we accumulate a bunch of similar lists. As my father said when I joined the CDN Air Force at 17, "Don't volunteer for anything." O well. Jim has invited me to spearhead the acquisition of said lists, and I have accepted the assignment. 

So, to all of you listers, three questions:

1. What lists do you possess that you think would be useful to your fellow AccessD/dba-SQL listers?
2. What lists do you lack that you desire?

(I couldn't resist the old programmer's joke. There are three types of programmers -- those who can count and those who can't.)

Chances are that more than one of you may volunteer to contribute similar or identical lists. The latter is easy to deal with. The former is a little tougher, since it might require UNIONing several lists, but that's ok.

I have one list ready to go, which is the list of words corresponding to letters that travel agents use to spell names. I think it is identical to the similar list from the military, but perhaps not. (In case you don't know what I mean, Able Baker Charlie etc.)

I also have another list of cities within North America, and states and provinces to correspond. It is not ready to go, there are some duplicates, but I could prune the dupes. The list consists only of those cities into which the company I was formerly associated with sold products, but it numbers about 5,000 cities, give or take 3. Far from exhaustive, but a good start, and similar lists could easily be UNIONed. That leaves out all the listers uninterested in cities in North America, but listers residing elsewhere might be able to contribute more cities. On this one, there is a difficulty. Within North America, there are states and provinces. In Switzerland, there are cantons.

On this subject, I have just done some searches in dictionary.com and come up with some hilarious definitions:

City -- an important town
Town -- a large village
Village -- a small community or group of houses in a rural area, larger than a
hamlet and usually smaller than a town, and sometimes (as in parts of
the U.S.) incorporated as a municipality.
Hamlet -- British. a village without a church of its own, belonging to the parish of another village or town.
County (the richest by far) --
1.the largest administrative division of a U.S. state: Miami, Florida, is in Dade County.  

2.one of the chief administrative divisions of a country or state, as in Great Britain and Ireland. 

3.one of the larger divisions for purposes of local administration, as in Canada and New Zealand. 

4.the territory of a county, esp. its rural areas, as in: "We farmed out in the county before moving to town.".  

5.the inhabitants of a county, as in, "It was supposed to be a secret, but you told the whole county.".  

6.the domain of a count or earl. 


All these years I have been under the (clearly false) impression that precise population-numbers defined these terms. Apparently I have wrong, lo these decades. I have just taken a local poll (only 4 people) and the agreement here is that a city is 100,000 people or more; a town is 999,999 people or fewer; a village is 2,000 people or fewer; a hamlet is 500 people or fewer. We four Canadians readily agreed on these numbers, but that might be something we picked up in school that has no relation to the larger world.

Arthur