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Glasgow (or Glaschu in Gaelic) is Scotland's largest city and unitary council, situated on the River Clyde in the country's west central lowlands. People from Glasgow are called Glaswegians, the term being modelled on the word Norwegian. Glaswegian is also the name of the local dialect, commonly known as the Glasgow Patter (see Dialect, below). The city was formerly a royal burgh, and the "Second City of the British Empire" in the Victorian era, it established itself as a major Atlantic trading port. The Clyde was the World's pre-eminent shipbuilding centre, building many revolutionary and famous vessels such as the Cunard liners Queen Mary, Queen Elizabeth and the QE2, and the Royal Yacht Britannia. The city grew in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to a population of over one million people, peaking at 1,088,000 people in 1931, however with population decline mainly due to the large scale relocation of people to new towns like East Kilbride and Cumbernauld on the outskirts of the city, and successive boundary changes, the current population of Glasgow is 629,501, based on the 2001 census. Approximately 1.1 million people live in the Greater Glasgow conurbation, a 15 mile (24 km) radius from the city centre, known as the City of Glasgow and the Greater Metropolitan area. The surrounding region of Strathclyde (from the Gaelic for "valley of the River Clyde") has a population of over 2.6 million, over half of the whole Scottish population. Known as the commercial capital of Scotland, the City of Glasgow is a bustling, cosmopolitan city. Glasgow is the third most popular foreign tourist destination in the UK, after Edinburgh, the Scottish capital, which ranks second, and London the UK capital. The city also has the UK's largest and most economically important commerce and retail centre outside of London. It is common to derive the name Glasgow from the older Brythonic glas cau or a Middle Gaelic cognate, which would have meant green hollow. The settlement probably had an earlier Cumbric name, Cathures; the modern name appears for the first time, in the Gaelic period (1116), as "Glasgu". "Dear green place" (Glaschu) has been misquoted as a Gaelic translation for the city, but this was actually Daniel Defoe's description of the city when he visited in the early 18th century; he also claimed that Glasgow was "the paradise of Scotland and one of the cleanliest and best built cities in Britain." Another writer of the time said of the River Clyde: "I have never seen before any river which for natural beauty can stand competition with the Clyde. Never did a stream glide more gracefully to the ocean or through a fairer region." At that time, the city's population numbered approximately 12,000, and its structures largely consisted of compact wooden buildings, none of which remain today.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasgow