I’ll be visiting Phoenix soon with some friends who grew up there. They took me on my first trip to the driving range last summer. Turns out, the fact that they are from Phoenix and that they play golf is not a coincidence.

Maricopa County, where Phoenix is located, has more golf courses than any other county in the US. Three of the top ten counties are in California, and another three are in Florida. Note that I opted not to normalize this map by population because it just looked like an inverse population map; it’s not particularly informative to know that the highest numbers of courses per capita belong to counties with fewer than a thousand people and a couple golf courses. If you must know, Hooker County, NE, would be at the top of that list with three courses for ~700 people.

I thought it would be fun to include a little word frequency analysis. I’ve always found naming conventions for golf courses to be a bit ridiculous, but I suppose the goal is to make you feel relaxed. This works for housing developments as well. For the single word frequency, I removed small words and the most common words that are in almost every name (e.g., golf, course, country, club, links), and was left with nature words. For these, I’ve counted the word and the plural, but not other modified forms (e.g., I counted “hill” and “hills” but not “hillcrest”). Of the 16,300 courses in the database, 968 had “hill” or “hills,” making it the most popular nature word in golf course names. The most common nature phrase was “rolling hills,” which occurred 38 times. Personally, I’m fonder of “blooper bay.”

Data source: http://www.poi-factory.com/node/29395