In the origins of country names, we find all kinds of surprising hidden histories. America, for example, comes directly from the name of Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci—yet how many people have even heard of him? Sometimes, in light of events since their founding (or “discovery” and naming by colonial powers), national names also conceal a dark and twisted irony.
Here are 10 of the most surprising.
10. Saudi Arabia
Unsurprisingly, Saudi Arabia is named for the people in charge, the characteristically pompous-sounding House of Saud. More surprising, for such a miserably corrupt and repressive regime, is that ‘Saud’ derives from the Arabic sa’d, meaning “happy.”
Few names could be more ironic for a nation so gutted by oil. Even its founder, Ibn Saud, was horrified by the cultural and moral havoc that oil wealth wreaked.
Today, it’s fair to say the name only applies to his pampered descendants and not to the millions they exploit in order to keep themselves happy or, as they say, sa’d.
9. Antigua and Barbuda
Before the Spanish arrived with their crazy ideas, the island of Antigua was known locally as Wadadadli. For Christopher Columbus, that just wasn’t old-fashioned enough, and he renamed it for the Church of Santa Maria de la Antigua (“St. Mary of the Ancient”) in Seville. The neighboring island, which, together with Antigua makes up the present-day nation, is thought to have been named Barbuda (“bearded”) on account of the beards of the locals—or, like Barbados, the lichen-covered palm trees. So Antigua and Barbuda basically means “Ancient and Bearded”.
When the British colonized the islands in the 17th century, the wealthy, slave-owning Codrington family established a sugar plantation and planned to make Barbuda a slave-breeding colony. Both islands remained in British possession until November 1, 1981, when Antigua and Barbuda gained their independence. But, while the black in the flag commemorates ties to Africa, Barbuda’s only town still bears the slaver name Codrington.
8. Namibia
The Namib desert is the oldest in the world, having been arid for at least 55 million years. What little moisture there is to sustain life comes from thick coastal fogs. So it’s little wonder that ‘Namib’ (and ‘Namibia’) come from nama, a word meaning “area where there is nothing.”
The country got its name from Mburumba Kerina, who founded several of its modern institutions. While studying in Indonesia, Kerina was asked by the Indonesian president for the name of his country, which in those days was still the colonial Southwest Africa. “That’s not a name,” said the president, “slaves and dogs are named by their masters” while “free men name themselves.”
Never mind that Indonesia retains its slave name; the young Kerina was so affected by this conversation that he later renamed his home country. He also renamed himself. His birth name, which he said had been “given by missionaries when [his] rights as a baby were not recognized,” was Eric William Getzen.
7. Nauru
Nauru appears to come from a local (Nauruan) term, anáoero, meaning “I go to the beach.” It’s a nod to the island nation’s once staggering natural beauty. Nowadays, however, given its desolation from strip-mining, leaving Nauruans “living on a narrow ring around a plateau of jagged, spiky, razor-sharp coral and limestone pillars,” its name is grimly mocking.
The story of Nauru’s fall begins in 1798, when it came to the attention of rising capitalist forces. Captain John Fearn, passing on the way to China, was so taken by the friendliness of the locals, the lush greenery, pristine beaches, and warm winds, that he named it Pleasant Island. A century of contact later, however, and Nauruans were gun-toting, heavy-drinking, chain-smoking thugs—such that in 1881, a British beachcomber living there told the British Navy there was nothing of value left “but pigs and coconuts.”
Unfortunately, he was wrong. There was plenty more to exploit. In 1901, when it was found that 80 percent of the island was rich in phosphate of lime, a mining rush began. Over the following decades, the lush green central plateau, along with its precious wildlife, was utterly destroyed. By 1921, when exports were at 200,000 tons a year (all at cut price), it had become a “ghastly tract of land, … its cavernous depths littered with broken coral, abandoned tram tracks, discarded phosphate baskets, and rusted American kerosene tins”. By 1968, when Nauru gained independence, more than 35 million metric tons of phosphate had been mined (enough to fill dump trucks bumper-to-bumper from New York to LA and back again). By now, that figure has reached 80 million (enough to fill dump trucks lined up between New York and Tokyo and back). The island has since been used as a tax haven and a hellish Australian detention center. Recently, the government has been gearing up to extract the last remaining 20 million tons of secondary phosphate reserves.
6. Ethiopia
Until the late 19th century, there was no Ethiopia as it exists today. The lands that comprise it were forcibly conquered in the 19th century and named by the modern nation’s genocidal first “Emperor” Menelik—with permission from Britain’s Queen Victoria.
Menelik hoped the new name, which he got from the Bible, would give his landgrab historical legitimacy. All it means, though, is “land of the negro”, or “burnt-faced”, in Greek.
It’s a common and controversial misconception that Ethiopia was a renaming of Abyssinia (Habesha in Amharic, from habesh, Arabic for “mongrel”). In fact, the conquered land of Ethiopia extends far beyond the original Abyssinia—which today amounts to more of a northern region or province. To conflate the two is to erase the brutal reality of the country’s formation. Even the capital of Ethiopia, Addis Ababa (meaning “new flower”), lies outside the historical borders of Abyssinia.
5. Kiribati
Despite its exotic spelling and pronunciation (Ki-ri-ba-si), the name for this Pacific island nation comes from nothing more fancy than “Gilbert”. In fact, until 1979, when Kiribati finally regained independence from the similarly deceptively named “Commonwealth”, it was known as the Gilbert Islands.
The eponymous Gilbert was Captain Thomas Gilbert, who got there in 1788 after dumping the first shipload of convicts in Australia.
Kiribati is the Gilbertese (yes, even the language was named after him) rendering of his name. Now known as I-Kiribati, the native tongue has 13 sounds—one of which, ‘ti’, is pronounced ‘si’ or ‘see’. Hence, one of the Gilberts, Christmas Island, was renamed Kiritimati (Ki-ri-si-ma-si).
4. Egypt
Although nowadays a modern Islamic country, Egypt’s ancient pagan history lives on its name. By way of Amarna Hikuptah, Greek Aigyptos, and French Egypte, the English name Egypt ultimately derives from Ha(t)-ka-ptah, meaning “temple of the soul (ka) of Ptah.” Interestingly, this is also where we get the word ‘Coptic’, the form of Christianity found in Egypt.
The ancient name, referring to the creator god Ptah, originally applied only to Memphis—the city where Ptah’s worship was based. It was the Greeks who took the name and applied it to the nation as a whole. The Egyptians themselves knew their land as Kemet, “black country,” in reference to the rich dark soil of the Nile, or Deshret, “red country,” meaning the deserts to either side.
Modern Egyptians, meanwhile, call it Misr, which in Arabic just means “country” or “fortress.”
3. Cameroon
Cameroon takes its name from the river running through it—the Wouri, which the Portuguese called the Rio dos Camarões, or “River of Prawns” due to the abundance of shrimp in its waters. Unimaginatively, they gave the nearby mountains the same name. In English, the river was the Cameroons River, and the mountains were just the Cameroons.
When the Germans took over, they applied their version of the word—Kamerun—to the whole of the country. By 1884, the name of the nation was settled, preserving its ignoble origin as little more than the shrimp aisle in the European colonists’ five-finger discount supermarket model of the world.
Nowadays, however, Cameroon is known for its relatively low levels of fish, restricting the development of fisheries.
2. The Solomon Islands
This Oceanian archipelago comprises almost one thousand islands—only a fraction of which are inhabited, as they have been for 5,000 years. It wasn’t until the 16th century that Europeans first laid eyes on them. And, just as they had in the New World, they immediately set about imposing their childlike fantasies.
Namely, the Spanish explorer Álvaro de Mendaña de Neira—the first European to get there—fancied that it must have been the source of King Solomon’s wealth, the origin of the gold for his temple. The one in Jerusalem. 15,000 kilometers away. Why? Because he saw some gold flecks in the river.
Since then, generations of exploitation at the hands of European colonists and missionaries, as well as Japanese and Allied forces in the Second World War, have irrevocably altered traditional ways of life. 95% of the population is now Christian and the Solomons are littered with war wrecks and airstrips. Ironically, there’s only one gold mine—but, according to the government, their economic hopes depend on it.
1. Belize
Belize didn’t get its name until 1973. In early colonial days, this Central American nation was known as the Bay of Honduras, from hondo, Spanish for “deep.” Later, from 1862, it was known as British Honduras.
The current name derives from the river that flows through the country. But it’s not clear where ‘Belize’ originally came from. It may be from the Maya word balix, meaning “muddy water,” or else belikin, meaning “land facing the sea.”
A more widely accepted derivation, however, is that ‘Belize’ was originally ‘Wallace’. This was the name of the Scottish buccaneer—Captain Peter Wallace—credited with discovering the mouth of the river and establishing a settlement around it. According to this theory, it was the Spaniards who morphed ‘Wallace’ into ‘Belize’. First, they substituted the W for the more easily pronounced V. Then, because a V sounds like a B in Spanish, ‘Vallis’ over time became ‘Ballis’. Speakers of other languages locally, such as the Maya, also influenced pronunciation until the name finally settled as ‘Belize’.