O'Hare International Airport
airport in Chicago, Illinois, United States
Chicago O'Hare International Airport (IATA: ORD, ICAO: KORD, FAA LID: ORD) is the primary international airport serving Chicago, Illinois, United States, located on the city's Northwest Side, approximately 17 miles (27 km) northwest of downtown. The airport is operated by the Chicago Department of Aviation and covers 7,627 acres (11.92 sq mi; 30.87 km2). It is the airport with the most runways in the world, with eight.
Designed to be the successor to Chicago's Midway International Airport, itself once nicknamed the "busiest square mile in the world", O'Hare began as an airfield serving a Douglas manufacturing plant for C-54 military transports during World War II. It was renamed Orchard Field Airport in the mid-1940s and assigned the IATA code ORD. In 1949, it was renamed after aviator Edward "Butch" O'Hare, the U.S. Navy's first Medal of Honor recipient during World War II. As the first major airport planned after World War II, O'Hare's innovative design pioneered concepts such as concourses, direct highway access to the terminal, jet bridges, and underground refueling systems.
O'Hare became famous during the jet age, holding the distinction as the world's busiest airport by passenger traffic from 1963 to 1998. It still ranks as one of the busiest airports in the world, according to the Airports Council International rankings. In 2025, O'Hare had more than 857,000 aircraft movements, averaging 2,340 per day, the most of any airport in the world. O'Hare has non-stop flights to 249 destinations in North America, South America, the Caribbean, Europe, Africa, Asia, Oceania, the Middle East and the North Atlantic region as of summer 2024. As of 2024, O'Hare is considered the most connected airport in the United States, and fifth most connected airport in the world.
On the ground, road access to the airport is offered by airport shuttle, bus, the Chicago "L", or taxis.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “O'Hare International Airport” is airport in Chicago, Illinois, United States. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through O'Hare, International and Airport, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “airport in Chicago, Illinois, United States” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
The strongest evidence will usually combine a dated visual record with documents produced by the authority responsible for the place. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q213717. VIAF identifies the subject as 150064073. The Library of Congress control number is n50048797. Authority coordinates are 41.979, -87.905. 9 of 10 selected statements include explicit references; 9 carry qualifiers and 2 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1949, 1963, 1998 and 2025.
Architectural summaries often privilege surviving fabric and can understate demolished phases, contested use or displaced communities. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Three-step research path
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This entry incorporates text from “O'Hare International Airport” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.