Nationality? I am "I go to the beach"

From Nearly every country on earth is named after one of four things by Thu-Huong Ha.

When the US president says “America first” to a room full of world leaders, he probably doesn’t mean to invoke the spirit of a 15th-century Italian. When Charles de Gaulle proclaimed, “La France n’est pas seule!” he likely wasn’t talking about a Germanic tribe from two millennia past. And Gandhi’s appeal to Britain to “quit India” definitely wasn’t just about the people living near the Indus River.

Our countries’ names instill in us a sense of pride. Our leaders use them as emotional triggers in speeches, and so do citizens, creating slogans around country names to rally support on social media and conjure unity in protests. It’s easier than putting “make the land between Mexico and Canada great again” on hats. But just like our first names are handed to us without our input, the names of nations are inherited, arbitrary, and, often, absurd. Sometimes we get names we don’t want, and our efforts to correct don’t stick.

According to our research, the majority of country names fall into just four categories:

a directional description of the country
a feature of the land
a tribe name
an important person, most likely a man

Further, our research reveals that the way countries get their names is hardly ever democratic, and very few are rooted in the national qualities we like to associate with them, like liberty, strength or justice.

Toponymy, the study of place-names

To figure out what we’re really saying when we say “America,” or “Papua New Guinea,” Quartz relied on the gold standard toponymy reference book, the Oxford Concise Dictionary of World Place-Names, by John Everett-Heath. We manually compiled information on all 195 independent states recognized by the US, to create a taxonomy of the world’s political order. Where the dictionary was unclear, we cross-referenced origin stories. We looked at country endonyms—the name a country calls itself—where markedly different from a country’s English name. (So 中国, or Zhōngguó, instead of China, and Suomi, not Finland.) If a country was named after an existing place—Chad after Lake Chad, or Algeria after the city of Algiers, for example—we did our best to seek the meaning of the original name.

The results are:

A tribe name - 33%

A feature of the land - 25%

A directional description of the country - 13%

An important person, most likely a man - 13%

So 84% of country names are covered by these four categories. There are about 20 countries whose name origins are veiled in history and mystery or whose name defies easy categorization.

And then there are a few countries whose names don’t fit into any major category—and these are arguably the most poetic. There’s tiny Comoros off the east African coast, whose name means “moon,” after the Arabic “al qamar.” Mexico is also said to have lunar roots, the Spanish simplification of the Aztec city, Metztlixihtlico, meaning “in the navel of the moon.”

There’s possibly the most badass, Druk Yul, Bhutan’s name for itself, thought to mean “land of the thunder dragon.” And a smattering of countries whose names are virtues, like Liberia’s “free land.”

Nauru, an island northeast of Australia, is perhaps the most delightful, reportedly named after the indigenous word “anáoero,” “I go to the beach.”