Origin Of Country Names

Hi

Looking for some information I came across this interesting web site:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o..._etymologies

Quoting the above site:

Ecuador:
"Equator" in Spanish, as the country lies on the Equator. The Center of the World Monument (La Mitad del Mundo) is just outside of Quito, the capital. It sits on Latitude 0 degrees, 0 minutes, 0 seconds. One can stand straddling a line and be in 2 hemispheres at once.

Venezuela:
from Italian Venezuola meaning "Little Venice", from the diminutive form of "Venezia". The native stilt-houses built on Lake Maracaibo impressed the European explorers Alonso de Ojeda and Amerigo Vespucci and reminded them of buildings in Venice.

Jerry B

For the good old US of A that's easy. Amerigo Vespucci was an Italian explorer (mentioned in the above post) and map maker. He wrote his name on what is now the North America and another map maker from Germany thought that that was the name of the continent and rewrote it to America and that gave us both North and South America. It would have been interesting if he wrote his last name, then we would be Vespuccians or the US of Vespucci (USV).