Puerto Rico is a territory of the United States. The word “Commonwealth” is used in the official name of the island, just as it is in the names of four states – Kentucky, Massachusetts, Virginia and Pennsylvania. “The Commonwealth of Puerto Rico” doesn’t describe a special legal status any more than “the Commonwealth of Kentucky” does. Still, the term confuses people who are not familiar with the way it is used.
For many American readers, the use of “commonwealth” suggests a special political identity, as in the former British Commonwealth, now the Commonwealth of Nations. This is a group of 53 independent nations which have chosen to be members of this multinational organization. “Commonwealth” has no such meaning in the names of the U.S. states and territories which use the term.
Since 2015, there has been a growing tendency to use the legally accurate term “territory” rather than “the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico.” This may reflect the increased recognition that the “Commonwealth” label is meaningless with respect to Puerto Rico’s status, or, in other words, its relationship with the United States.
But noticing a trend is not enough. We checked into Big Data to make sure.
In 2015, Google found 159,000 mentions of the territory of Puerto Rico in news reports:
Searching for “Puerto Rico, a territory,” which captures a slightly different set of articles, produced 187,000 results.
Only 8,790 mentions of “the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico” turned up at that time.
Redoing this search in 2024, we see 22,500,000 searches for “the commonwealth of Puerto Rico” and 343,000,000 — over ten times as many — for “the territory of Puerto Rico.” Clearly the ambiguous “commonwealth” label is on the decline.
How long has this been going on? We cannot see Google search results from the past, but we can check Google Trends to see how people’s searches for the two terms have changed over time. Clearly, the use of the term “Commonwealth of Puerto Rico” hit its peak in 2005. The phrase “territory of Puerto Rico” showed a flat line until 2010.
The chart below shows the trend from 2004 to 2024, with “territory” eventually outstripping “commonwealth.” The blue peak from 2017 reflects the influence of Hurricane Maria, an event that informed many people on the mainland that Puerto Rico is a territory of the United States for the first time.
We cannot look back further for online use, but we can use the nGram viewer to check books as far back as the 16th century. In our final chart below, we can see that the “commonwealth of Puerto Rico” was occasionally mentioned in the 1930s and reached peaks around 1960 and again in 1980 before dipping as the years roll on toward 2010.
The increase in usage of the term “Commonwealth” corresponds with the 1952 enactment of Puerto Rico’s local constitution, officially called the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. Although “Commonwealth” is in the official title of this document, the local constitution did not change Puerto Rico’s status as a U.S. territory. The law’s legislative history is clear on this point, and it appears that Big Data now recognizes the fallacy of “commonwealth” as well.
Updated April 12, 2024
Nice breakdown!