Appearance
5.3 — Why Places Are Called What They Are
Place names are the oldest surviving words in most languages, because a name outlives the language that made it. Several of them are mistakes, several are the same word said three times, and one continent is named after a mapmaker's footnote.
The continents
Why is America named after Amerigo Vespucci and not Columbus?
Because a German cartographer read the right pamphlet.
Columbus died insisting he had reached Asia. Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine navigator, made voyages along the South American coast and wrote accounts arguing that this was not Asia at all but a landmass previously unknown to Europe — a Mundus Novus, a new world.
In 1507 Martin Waldseemüller, working in a small town in Lorraine, produced a large world map incorporating the new discoveries, and printed the name America on the southern landmass in Vespucci's honour, feminising his first name to match Europa and Asia. He explained the choice in an accompanying booklet.
The map sold widely. Waldseemüller later had doubts and removed the name from a subsequent map, replacing it with "Terra Incognita" — but it was too late. Other mapmakers had copied it, and by the time anybody reconsidered, the name was on every chart in Europe.
Vespucci himself neither asked for it nor knew about it; he died in 1512 and the naming was not widely known until later.
Where do the other continent names come from?
Europe and Asia are both probably Semitic, from Phoenician or Akkadian roots meaning roughly "sunset" and "sunrise" — the lands west and east of the Aegean as seen from the Levantine coast. That is disputed, and the alternative traces Europa to the Greek myth of the princess carried off by Zeus.
Africa most likely comes from the Afri, a people living near Carthage, whose name the Romans applied first to a province and then to everything south of it.
Australia is from Latin terra australis incognita, the unknown southern land — a landmass European geographers had postulated for centuries on the theory that the southern hemisphere needed weight to balance the northern. They were reasoning from a wrong premise and happened to be right that something was there.
Antarctica simply means "opposite the Arctic", and Arctic comes from Greek arktos, a bear — after the constellations of the Great and Little Bear, which circle the northern pole. So the Arctic is the region under the bears, and Antarctica is the region opposite the bears. There are polar bears in the Arctic and none in Antarctica, which makes the naming a coincidence that sounds like a plan.
The mistakes
Which places are named by misunderstanding?
Several, and the pattern is nearly always a European asking a local a question that was not understood.
India comes through Greek and Persian from the river Sindhu — the Indus — so the country is named after a river that now flows mostly through Pakistan.
The West Indies are called that because Columbus thought he had reached the Indies. The entire population of the Americas was called Indians for the same reason, and the term outlasted the error by five centuries.
Yucatán is traditionally explained as a Spanish question answered with a Mayan phrase meaning something like "I do not understand you". Linguists regard the story as probably a folk etymology, but a related confusion is likely.
Nome, Alaska may come from a British naval chart annotated "? Name" beside an unlabelled cape, misread as "C. Nome". The story is well known and not certain.
Canada comes from the Iroquoian kanata, meaning a village or settlement — Jacques Cartier was being directed to a specific village and took it as the name of the country.
Which place names are the same word twice?
Many, and they are called tautological place names. They happen when a new population arrives, takes the existing name as a proper noun without knowing what it means, and adds their own word for the feature.
The River Avon in England means "the river river" — afon is simply Welsh for river. There are several Avons.
Sahara Desert means desert desert, from Arabic ṣaḥrāʼ.
Lake Chad means lake lake, from a local word for a large expanse of water.
Torpenhow Hill in Cumbria is the celebrated extreme case, sometimes glossed as hill-hill-hill-hill from four successive languages — though etymologists say the last element is not really doing that, so treat it as a good story with a shaky ending.
Mississippi River is river river, from an Ojibwe word meaning great river. Mount Fujiyama is mountain-mountain, since yama is mountain. And the Gobi Desert is desert desert in Mongolian.
India
What do Indian city names actually mean?
Most contain a common suffix identifying the kind of settlement, and once you know a handful, a very large number of names open up.
-pur or -pura means city or town, from Sanskrit: Jaipur is the city of Jai Singh, Kanpur, Nagpur, Udaipur, Solapur. -abad is Persian for a settled or cultivated place, marking names given under Muslim rule: Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Allahabad, Aurangabad. -nagar is another word for town: Srinagar, Ahmednagar. -garh means fort: Chandigarh, Aligarh, Ramgarh. -ganj is a market. -halli is a village in Kannada, which is why so many Bangalore neighbourhoods end in it.
Some specific ones. Mumbai is from Mumbadevi, a goddess of the local Koli fishing community. Kolkata most likely from Kalikshetra, the field of Kali, or from a village name Kalikata. Delhi's origin is genuinely uncertain, with candidates including a king named Dhillu and a Prakrit word meaning loose, supposedly after an iron pillar that shifted. Chennai is from Chennappa Nayaka, a local ruler, while Madras probably comes from a village name Madraspatnam. Bengaluru is popularly explained as benda kaal ooru, the town of boiled beans, from a legend about a king fed by an old woman — but a ninth-century inscription with the name predates the legend.
Why were so many Indian cities renamed?
Because the English spellings were transliterations made by British administrators, often from a language other than the local one, and they had drifted a long way from what people actually said.
Bombay to Mumbai in 1995, Madras to Chennai in 1996, Calcutta to Kolkata in 2001, Bangalore to Bengaluru in 2014, Trivandrum to Thiruvananthapuram, Poona to Pune, Cochin to Kochi, Baroda to Vadodara, Orissa to Odisha.
In most cases the local name never changed — Bengalis had always said Kolkata. What changed was the official English form. In some cases the change was more contested: Allahabad to Prayagraj in 2018 replaced a Mughal-era name rather than an English misspelling, which is a different kind of decision.
Why is the Indian Ocean the only ocean named after a country?
Because it was the ocean whose trade Europeans encountered through India, and the name was applied from outside.
The Arabs called it the Sea of Zanj or simply the Great Sea; Sanskrit texts call it Ratnakara, the mine of jewels. The English name comes through Latin from Greek usage.
Every other ocean is named for a direction, a mythological figure or an attribute. The Pacific was named by Magellan, who called it Mar Pacífico, the peaceful sea, after emerging from the violent straits at the tip of South America into unusually calm water. It is the largest and in many ways the least peaceful ocean on the planet, and he named it on a lucky crossing.
Europe and elsewhere
What do European capital names mean?
London is pre-Roman and disputed; the Roman Londinium is probably built on a Celtic name whose meaning is unrecovered. Paris is from the Parisii, a Gaulish tribe. Berlin is probably Slavic, from a root meaning swamp, which fits the terrain. Moscow is from the Moskva river, meaning uncertain.
Istanbul is a corruption of the Greek phrase eis tēn polin, "to the city" — what you said when you were going there — which became the name after the Ottoman conquest. Before that it was Constantinople after Constantine, and before that Byzantium after a legendary founder.
Vienna, Cologne, Lincoln, Chester and Manchester all carry Roman fingerprints: -chester and -caster come from Latin castrum, a fort, so Manchester and Lancaster and Doncaster are all fort-towns.
Reykjavík means smoky bay, named by Norse settlers for the steam rising from geothermal springs — which is now the reason Iceland heats itself almost entirely without fossil fuel.
Which countries are named after a person?
Surprisingly few, and most are recent.
Colombia after Columbus. Bolivia after Simón Bolívar. The Philippines after Philip II of Spain. Saudi Arabia after the Al Saud family, which makes it one of the very few countries named after a currently ruling dynasty. Israel after the biblical name given to Jacob.
Seychelles is named after a French finance minister. The Marshall Islands after a British sea captain who passed by.
Going the other way, several people-derived names have been shed on independence: Rhodesia, named after Cecil Rhodes, became Zimbabwe after a great stone ruin; the Gold Coast became Ghana after a medieval empire; and the Belgian Congo passed through Zaire back to the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Why do so many American place names come from elsewhere?
Because settlers named things after home, and then after everything else.
The United States has a New York, New Jersey, New Hampshire and New Orleans, plus dozens of towns lifted straight from Europe — there are places called Paris in about twenty states, and a Berlin, Athens, Rome, Cairo, Moscow and Lebanon in many of them.
Layered underneath is a much older stratum of Indigenous names that survived, usually mangled through French or English ears: Mississippi, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Michigan, Wisconsin, Chicago, Milwaukee, Manhattan. More than half of US state names come from Native American languages.
Los Angeles was founded as El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles, the town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels, which shortened for obvious reasons. San Francisco, San Diego, Santa Fe, Sacramento, Las Vegas and Florida are all Spanish, marking how much of the country was colonised from the south before it was settled from the east.
The ones that changed on purpose
Which places have been renamed for political reasons?
Renaming is one of the cheapest ways for a new regime to assert itself, and the list is long.
St Petersburg became Petrograd in 1914 because the original name sounded German during a war with Germany, then Leningrad in 1924, then St Petersburg again in 1991 after a referendum. Three names in one lifetime for many residents.
Stalingrad, site of the war's most brutal battle, became Volgograd in 1961 during de-Stalinisation.
Salisbury became Harare, Léopoldville became Kinshasa, Batavia became Jakarta, and Saigon became Ho Chi Minh City — though a very large number of people in it still say Saigon.
Persia formally requested in 1935 that other countries call it Iran, which is what its own people had always called it, from a root meaning "of the Aryans". The change caused lasting confusion in the West, where Persia had been the name for two and a half thousand years, and there was a period in the 1950s when the government considered asking for it back.
What is the shortest and longest place name?
The shortest are single letters: Å, meaning river or stream in Scandinavian languages, is the name of several villages in Norway, Sweden and Denmark. Signs from those places are stolen constantly.
The longest in regular use is a New Zealand hill with an 85-letter Maori name, and the longest official town name is the Welsh Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, which is not organic: it was extended in the 1860s as a deliberate publicity exercise by the local community to attract railway passengers. It is the earliest well-documented case of a place renaming itself for tourism, and it worked.
Bangkok's full Thai ceremonial name runs to 168 letters in transliteration and holds a Guinness record; Thais call the city Krung Thep, the city of angels, in daily use.
What comes next
The next page stays with the map but looks at where the lines make no sense — borders through houses, countries inside countries, and the places whose ownership is genuinely unresolved.