Southwestern

Southwestern is an adjective used to describe the southwest region of a country or the southern-western part of a place. In common usage, it designates the Southwestern United States, a cultural and biogeographic region that roughly includes parts of Arizona, New Mexico, southern California, southern Nevada, western Texas, and portions of Colorado and Utah. The area features desert and semi-arid climates, dramatic basins and mountain ranges, and ecosystems such as the Sonoran, Mojave, and Chihuahuan deserts. Major cities include Phoenix, Tucson, Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and El Paso, alongside a long history shaped by Indigenous communities, Spanish and Mexican heritage, and later American settlement.

The term also appears in the names of institutions and organizations. Southwestern University is a private liberal arts university in Georgetown, Texas, founded in 1840, among the oldest higher education institutions in the state. The Southwestern Athletic Conference (SWAC) is an active NCAA conference comprising historically Black colleges and universities in the southwestern United States. The defunct Southwestern Conference (SWC) was a major early- to mid-20th-century athletic league based in Texas and surrounding states; it dissolved in the 1990s after realignment.

More broadly, “southwestern” can refer to areas at the southern and western edges of larger regions in other countries, where the designation highlights distinct cultural, historical, or geographic characteristics.