West Texas

West Texas
Region
West of Notrees
West Texas counties in red; counties sometimes included in West Texas in pink
Country	United States
State	Texas
Largest city	El Paso
Population  (2020)
• Total	2,300,264

West Texas is a loosely defined region in the U.S. state of Texas, generally encompassing the arid and semiarid lands west of a line drawn between the cities of Wichita Falls, Abilene, and Del Rio.

No consensus exists on the boundary between East Texas and West Texas.^[1] While most Texans understand these terms, no boundaries are officially recognized and any two people are likely to describe the boundaries of these regions differently. The historian and geographer Walter Prescott Webb has suggested that the 98th meridian separates East and West Texas;^[2] writer A.C. Greene proposed that West Texas extends west of the Brazos River.^[3] Use of a single line, though, seems to preclude the use of other separators, such as an area—Central Texas. Texas is part of the American South and the American Southwest at the same time, while the semiarid and desert climates of West Texas are clearly characteristic of the American Southwest.

West Texas is often subdivided according to distinct physiographic features. The portion of West Texas that lies west of the Pecos River is often called "Far West Texas" or the "Trans-Pecos", a term introduced in 1887 by geologist Robert T. Hill.^[4] The Trans-Pecos lies within the Chihuahuan Desert and is the aridest part of the state. Another part of West Texas is the Llano Estacado, a vast region of high, level plains extending into Eastern New Mexico and the Texas Panhandle. East of the Llano Estacado lies the “redbed country” of the Rolling Plains, and south of the Llano Estacado lies the Edwards Plateau. The Rolling Plains and Edwards Plateau subregions act as transitional zones between eastern and western Texas.