It's a running joke on TV's The Simpsons—the show never identifies the state in which the Simpsons' hometown of Springfield is located. But I wouldn't look too hard for it on a map, since Springfield's state somehow has deserts, swamps, beaches, and glaciers, its home state's capital is just called Capital City, and it somehow borders Ohio, Nevada, Maine, and Kentucky. Creator Matt Groening gave the fictional burg the quintessentially generic middle American name to make it feel like a TV Everytown, and he's right: Springfield is one of the most common place names on the national map. But it isn't the most common.

Springfield, Massachusetts casts a long shadow.

The United States Postal Service keeps careful track of the names of its post offices, and sure enough, Springfield leads the list by a large margin. There are 41 Springfield Post Offices, including five in Wisconsin alone. (That's nothing compared to Ohio, which has eleven townships named Springfield.) Most of these towns are named, directly or indirectly, for Springfield, Massachusetts, an important American manufacturing center during the nation's first century.

97 percent of all Americans have a Riverside in their state.

According to a common factoid, there's a community called Springfield in all 50 states, but the U.S. Board on Geographic Names says that's not true: only 34 states have a Springfield. The real champ is Riverside. Unless you live in Alaska, Hawaii, Louisiana, or Oklahoma, there's at least one Riverside in your state.

Don't have a cow, man: Fairview beats Springfield cold.

But even Riverside isn't the most common place name, due to in-state repeats. There are "only" 186 Riversides, but Fairview and Midway are way ahead, jockeying for the top spot. Playing around with the online Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) database, I see that at last count there were 273 places called Fairview and 257 called Midway. There are almost three Fairviews for every Springfield!

Do you know the way to all the San Joses?

Internationally, quaint soap opera town names like Fairview and Midway get outnumbered by Spanish-language pueblos. According to the U.S. GEOnet database, there are 1,716 San Joses worldwide, and 1,691 San Antonios. The top non-Spanish name is Russian: there are 571 Aleksandrovkas in the Slavic world. I wonder if "Springfield" is called "Aleksandrovka" when The Simpsonsairs in Russia.