Essential English phrases

Long Beach, in its own shorthand — from the hip-hop of the 1990s and still used everywhere from radio stations to council speeches. 'The Beach' means the city; 'the beach' means the sand.

Four artificial islands in the harbour, landscaped and floodlit to look like resorts, that are working oil platforms. Locals point them out to visitors; nobody who lives here thinks about them.

The Port of Long Beach, which the city owns. It moved a record 9.88 million containers in 2025 and is the second-busiest seaport in the United States. When people say the port is slow or busy they are talking about the local economy.

Belmont Shore — the strip of Second Street between the peninsula and Naples, and the default place to meet someone for a drink. 'In the Shore' is a location, not a direction.

A separate city of its own, entirely surrounded by Long Beach — different police, different sales tax, different city hall, same school district. You can drive into and out of it in ninety seconds without noticing.

The bank of low cloud that sits over the coast most mornings from May to July — 'May Gray' and 'June Gloom'. It burns off by lunchtime and it is why coastal Long Beach is ten degrees cooler than inland Orange County.

The federal housing choice voucher. California law makes refusing one unlawful source-of-income discrimination, and you will see 'Section 8 welcome' on listings across the city — worth knowing what it means before you misread a listing.

Southern California puts 'the' in front of every freeway. The 710 is the port truck route and the one that decides your air quality; the 405 is the one that decides your commute.

The Metro light rail from downtown Long Beach to downtown Los Angeles and on to Azusa — until 2019 it was the Blue Line, and older residents still call it that. About an hour to 7th Street/Metro Center.

The officially designated district along Anaheim Street between Atlantic and Junipero. Long Beach has the largest Cambodian community outside Cambodia, and the food along that mile is the reason to learn the word.

The nickname for the cluster of launch and space-hardware companies that has grown up in the old Douglas and Boeing plants north of the airport — Rocket Lab, Relativity, Vast, SpinLaunch. It is where most of the city's new engineering jobs are.

911 for emergencies, (562) 435-6711 for the Long Beach Police non-emergency line. 562 is the area code for Long Beach and the surrounding south-east LA County cities.