Why is America so named? What is the origin of the word?
America was named after Amerigo Vespucci; however it was given it’s name by cartographer Martin Waldseemueller in 1507. Why he named the New World (actually, just South America) America rather than Vespucciland–is easy to see. Amerigo’s first name was a lot more euphonious than his last name and could be latinized into a word that started and ended with the letter A, just like Asia and Africa before it. Also, Vespucci was one of those people known in his own lifetime mostly by his first. (As a caveat; the reasons the inhabitants of the USA are commonly known as “Americans” despite the size of the continent and the existence of several countries, is because firstly, the natives of the New World were coined “Americans” by the Europeans and then, when Europeans began settling the New World, they adopted the same term for themselves and their progeny.
