Paducah ( pə-DOO-kə) is a house rule-class city in and the county seat of McCracken County, Kentucky, United States. The largest city in the Jackson Purchase region, it is located at the confluence of the Tennessee and the Ohio rivers, halfway along with St. Louis, Missouri, to the northwest and Nashville, Tennessee, to the southeast. As of the 2020 census, the population was 27,137, up from 25,024 during the 2010 U.S. Census. Twenty blocks of the city’s downtown have been designated as a historic district and listed upon the National Register of Historic Places.

Paducah is the hub of its micropolitan area, which includes McCracken, Ballard and Livingston counties in Kentucky and Massac County in Illinois.

Paducah was first approved as “Pekin” around 1821 by European Americans James and William Pore. The town was laid out by speculator and surveyor William Clark in 1827 and renamed Paducah.

Although local lore long connected this broadcast to an eponymous Chickasaw chief “Paduke” and his band of “Paducahs”, authorities upon the Chickasaw have past said that there was never any chief or tribe of that name, or all like it. The Chickasaw language does not have linked words. Instead, historians admit that Clark named the town for the Comanche people of the western plains. They were known by regional settlers as the Padoucas, from a Spanish transliteration of the Kaw word Pádoka or the Omaha Pádoⁿka.