The Boston Globe
When it comes to Boston neighborhoods, using the definite article is far from definitive.
The “Welcome To The Back Bay” sign on Boylston Street, is photographed on Thursday April 30, 2026.
Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff
May 17, 2026 | 5:00 AM
6 minutes to read
Here’s a trick question: what’s one thing the Back Bay, the Fenway, and the Seaport all have in common?
Sure, upscale apartments and sky-high rental prices. But they also share something more basic, a simple, three-letter word: “the.”
Or, perhaps, none of them do.
When it comes to Boston neighborhoods, using the definite article is far from definitive. For some, adding a “the” before the neighborhood name is only natural, a nod to its unique character and historical identity. It’s always “the” North End. “The” South End. God forbid you drop the “the” from the West End. Someone will want a word.
But bump into someone on the street, and you might well hear them dropping the “the.” I live in Fenway. They work in Back Bay. Let’s grab a drink in Seaport.
“It’s just Back Bay,” Marianne Zemmes, a graduate student at Boston University, said while sitting on a park bench on Commonwealth Avenue. “I’ve never heard of ‘the’ Back Bay, actually.”
Tell that to some residents, and they’ll give you a strange face.
“We always say ‘the’ Back Bay, when somebody asks us where we live,” said Kathy Ennis, 76. “I have no idea, really, why we do that.”
Her husband, David Ennis, 75, took a moment to roll the words over in his mouth.
“‘Back Bay’” he considered. “I live in ‘Back Bay.’”
After a few seconds, he shook his head. “It doesn’t work,” he said.
For some residents, the distinction is lost completely.
“I’ve never heard the term ‘Seaport,’ except on the signs that I see on the way to the airport,” said Anthony Sammarco, a local historian. “I guess it’s the official name. But do you hear people saying it? No!”
But reality is not so cut and dried. In a poll of a neighborhood Facebook group, 68 percent of respondents said they lived “in Seaport,” versus 32 percent “in the Seaport.” (The sole point of agreement, it seems, is that barely any residents use “South Boston Waterfront,” which is the neighborhood’s official name.)
If residents are split, what does the city have to say?
Official sources aren’t much help. The city website lists every neighborhood without a “the” — even those, like the South End, where the presence of a definite article is hardly controversial. And even those names aren’t “official,” since city planners work in terms of zoning districts rather than traditional neighborhood boundaries.
(For the record, the Globe’s senior copy editor recommends “the” for all relevant neighborhood names.)
So there’s not much agreement one way or the other. Sounds about right for Boston, where seemingly trivial issues can spark sharp debate.
“I think it has a lot to do with the longevity of exposure to the city of Boston, and to the Back Bay neighborhood, specifically,” said Meg Mainzer-Cohen, president of the Back Bay Association. “Whether you grew up here, or whether you more recently came here. I think that’s where the distinctions lie.”
In her experience, longer-term residents typically default to including the definite article, while more recent arrivals “may not have fully adapted the same vernacular.”
That checks out: most histories of the area use “the” Back Bay, dating back to 1857, when city planners first began filling in the marshy water to build housing. So does Henry James, in his Gilded Age novel “The Bostonians,” describing the newly built neighborhood as “a row of houses, impressive … in their extreme modernness.” (“Don’t you hate the name?” one character quips.)
Ever since, though, “Back Bay” has closed the gap; a review of Google Books data shows that, in written use at least, the two are now virtually neck-and-neck.
For proponents of “the Back Bay,” the article makes a small but crucial distinction; like “the” Ohio State University, it signals something special and unique.
“There are other Back Bays,” Mainzer-Cohen said. “I don’t think the shopping is as good in Back Bay, Antarctica as it is in ‘the’ Back Bay.”
Calling it “the Fenway,” some say, also helps distinguish the neighborhood (formally a part of Fenway-Kenmore) from the ballpark. That would make sense, if it weren’t for a recent social media poll where nearly 90 percent of people said that plain old “Fenway” is just fine.
What to call the waterfront neighborhood with luxury condos and high-end restaurants is a pricklier question, entangled in decades of redevelopment and local squabbling. First proposed as “the Seaport District,” it was officially named “the South Boston Waterfront” — a concession by Mayor Thomas Menino to South Boston politicians that has not stood the test of time.
Developers, for the most part, have ignored the official name in favor of the standalone “Seaport” branding — itself a matter of legal dispute in some cases.
A Seaport office building under construction in 2021. – David L. Ryan/Globe Staff
Neighborhood advocate Steve Hollinger said, from his perspective, dropping the “the” is something of a branding scheme. Developers have long sought to establish the neighborhood as “its own thing,” he said, and plenty of residents feel the same way.
“There’s probably more of a hip crowd that calls it ‘Seaport,’ and that’s sort of the target audience of WS Development,” he said, referring to the firm responsible for much of the neighborhood’s transformation. “Whether they’re transplants or not, I don’t know, but [they are] definitely skewing younger.”
WS Development runs bostonseaport.xyz, the all-but-official neighborhood website which almost exclusively uses just “Seaport.” (The domain for bostonseaport.com is still held by Hollinger, who said he “didn’t want them suggesting they own the rights to that word.”)
Hollinger, 63, said that while he probably refers to the neighborhood both ways — “It kind of depends on the context,” he said — most people he knows tend to use the definite article.
But, as Google Books data shows, “the Seaport” loyalists may soon be a minority — if they aren’t already.
So if most neighborhood residents call it “Seaport,” does that make it right?
Maybe, said Margaret Thomas, a linguistics professor at Boston College.
“In each community, people are innovating, unconsciously or self-consciously, to create new forms,” she said. “[Some] people are attracted to new forms. Others are repelled by new forms.”
And it’s the collective “speech community,” she said, that ultimately decides what to call things.
Usually, Thomas said, place names are more stable than other elements of language, which often shift over time.
But that doesn’t mean they can’t evolve as well. We may think of Roxbury as an opaque proper noun today, but the name comes from its stony ground (“Rocksborough”). Other names are even stranger contractions: the original Boston, in Lincolnshire, England, was once St. Botolph’s Town.
“It was [once] a description, but it’s just become a label, like a non-parsable label,” Thomas said.
Perhaps like Seaport.
It’s no surprise, she added, that young people seem to be more likely to drop the “the,” given the generational habit of experimenting with language.
“Young people, teenagers, college students, are kind of a dynamo of linguistic change,” Thomas said.
Look no further than Thomas’ own students. In an informal survey, most indicated they would never say “the” when talking about [the] Seaport, [the] Back Bay, or [the] Fenway. Even those raised in the Boston area said they would drop the definite article at least sometimes.
“The whole system is constantly undergoing change, erosion,” Thomas said. “Like the dunes, they never disappear; they just move around, century after century.”
Hollinger has lived in the Seaport for more than three decades, but said he doesn’t get riled up over a three-letter word. He remembers the naming tug-of-war between Menino and South Boston, something that’s better off in the past.
There are bigger things to be worried about in the neighborhood, he noted.
“I don’t see the world as binary,” Hollinger said. “Whatever you want to call it, call it.”
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