This was most noticeable with the concept of Terra Australis during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Before our planet had been fully explored, a lot of mapmakers had to guess and predict what land there was in undiscovered parts of the world. At that time, we knew there were copious amounts of land in the northern hemisphere, so there must have been huge amounts of land in the southern hemisphere too.
When the land was first discovered by Dutch explorer Abel Tasman, he dubbed the land he found New Holland (pretty obvious explanation there since Abel was Dutch, after all), but that name didn’t stick. James Cook first set foot on the island in 1770 and dubbed it New South Wales. But it was Captain Matthew Flinders, in the 1800s, who was the first to navigate the entire coast of the land. This proved it was in fact an island and popularized the name Australia, referencing the legendary Terra Australis. The name became official in 1824.
FRANCE
France, much like the nation of Russia, is named after the people who lived there, in this case, the Franks. The country’s Latin name is Francia which means “country of the Franks.” The name originally belonged to the entire Frankish Kingdom, which at its peak not only included the majority of modern France, but parts of modern Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, and Spain!
The Franks were originally a Germanic people who lived in the north of Europe around the Rhine River. They invaded the land of France (which back then was called Gaul under the control of Julius Caesar and the Roman Empire) and made it their own.
But how exactly did the Franks get their name? Traditionally, one of the popular theories is that they got their name from their weapon of choice—a type of throwing axe that was called a Francisca. How cool is it that France is a country named after a people who are named after a weapon! I mean, it would be cool, if it were true. More recent evidence points to the axe being named after the people rather than the other way around. Nowadays, it’s believed that the name Franks means “freeman,” coming from the Old English franc/franca meaning “free,” possibly because the Franks were tax-free after they conquered Gaul.
It is also from this idea of being free where the term “to be frank” is thought to come from, meaning to be “free to do/say as you wish.”
THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Of course, this country isn’t simply called America, but it is commonly referred to as just that. What is just called America (sort of) is the continent that the USA is situated on. Some consider the landmass with Canada to the north and Chile to the south as a single continent of the Americas, while others break them into two separate continents of North America and South America. Panama is generally considered to be the most southern part of North America, with Colombia being the most northern part of South America on the mainland.
The story everyone seems to know is that of Christopher Columbus being the first European to discover and set foot in America. Yet the person we are much more interested in today is Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci. While Columbus still thought that the land he discovered was the western side of Asia, it was Amerigo who put forward the idea that the land was in fact completely separate from Asia, and with foresight on our side, we know who was correct there.
Amerigo didn’t name the land after himself (what a humble guy) and instead simply called this land “the New World” as it was land completely new to the Europeans who went on to traverse it. So, who was it that named the land after the Italian explorer? That honor goes to German mapmaker Martin Waldseemüller. When he was creating a map to reflect all the discoveries made (imagine being alive at the time when the maps weren’t finished yet!), he took it upon himself to label the area where—at my estimation—modern Argentina, Chile, and Paraguay are, as simply America, coming from the Latinization of Amerigo’s name Americus Vespucius. Amerigo Vespucci is thought to be named after Saint Emeric of Hungary, meaning that the name America was coined by a German, who named it after an Italian, who was named after a Hungarian!
As for the “United States of” part of the country’s name well…that’s not as exciting. When the country gained its independence, it was just that—a collection of states that were united. It started with the thirteen founding colonies, and now is the fifty states we all know today. The term’s earliest recording is from an anonymous article written in a Virginia newspaper in 1776, with “United States of America” going on to appear in the draft of the Declaration of Independence and in the preamble of the Constitution itself.
KENYA
Kenya has ostriches to thank for how it got its name. Okay, so that might be a bit of a stretch. The name Kenya strikes up the impression of the classic, almost prehistoric idea of Africa many have in mind, yet that name is pretty modern. We don’t really have any idea of what the people of the land would have called Kenya. The name was officially given to country when it was declared a crown colony of Britain in 1920.
The country is named after Mount Kenya, the second tallest mountain in Kenya and one of its most iconic landmarks. So how did Mount Kenya get its name? There are multiple suggestions as to how this name came to be. One of the more popular stories is when Johann Ludwig Krapf and Johannes Rebmann (two missionaries exploring the land in 1846) asked their native guide what they called the huge mountain they saw in the distance. The guide told them the mountain was called “kiima kya kenia” in his language of Kamba. “Kenia” translates to glitter or shine in relation to the shining ice that capped the mountain.
Nonetheless, Kamba wasn’t the only language in the region. The Ameru people called the mountain kirimira which means “mountain of white feather,” once again referencing the ice on the mountains. The Kikuyu people called the mountain Kirinyaga or Kiri Nyaga which can be either translated to “God’s Resting Place” or “the Place with the ostriches.” Some even feel the mountain looks similar to the male ostrich with the black of the mountain and the white of the snow sharing the same colors as the huge flightless birds, but, like I said, it’s a tad of a stretch. It was one of these dialect names for the mountain that led to the mispronunciation in English as Kenya.
GREAT BRITAIN
Okay, so hear me out. I know technically there is no country simply called Great Britain. Great Britain is the geographic name for the island that is home to England, Wales, and Scotland which joins up with northern Ireland to become the country of the United Kingdom. But come on, the UK as a name is kind of boring.
Great Britain, on the other hand, has a much more interesting etymology. The name Britain has its roots in a tribe of people that Greek explorer Pytheas came across in the land of Britain in the fourth century BCE. These people were called the Prettani, leading to Pytheas giving two names to the land he found them in—Brettania and Prettanike. These two names eventually led to the creation of just one name Pretannia, which sounds an awful lot like a name we still hear today, Britannia.
So, with the Prettani and the name Prettanike for the country, where did the B at the start of its name come from? It seems that when writing, Pytheas had a habit of using Ps and Bs interchangeably. It was the spelling with the B that stuck around when the Romans took over the land and dubbed it the Province of Britannia.
Yet this Roman province only covered modern day England and Wales, so what was going on with Scotland? Alas, the Romans could never truly conquer the Scottish, so the Scots stayed as they were, separated from Britain, with the Roman part of Britain eventually becoming known as the Kingdom of England.
The “great” in Great Britain kind of has two different meanings. The first being that it’s greater in size compared to France’s Brittany. But it officially got the title of Great Britain to refer to the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of Scotland when King James VI became king of both nations. Both countries came together to be called the United Kingdom of Great Britain.
Britain is also sometimes referred to by a different name, Blighty. While this might just sound like a cute pet name for the land, there is actually more history to it than that. The nickname was born out of a sense of homesickness that Brits who were away from the country came to use with affection during the peak of the Victorian rule of India, and in the trenches of World War I. It comes from the Urdu word vilayati, which