Mount Everest is named after Sir George Everest, a British surveyor who served as Surveyor General of India from 1830 to 1843. The name was proposed in 1856 and officially adopted in 1865 by the Royal Geographical Society. Ironically, George Everest himself objected to the honor, and the mountain already had a Tibetan name centuries before any British surveyor pointed a telescope at it.
How British Surveyors Found the World’s Tallest Peak
In the mid-1800s, the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India was systematically measuring the subcontinent, including the Himalayan range. Between November 1849 and January 1850, surveyors observed a peak they labeled “Peak XV” from six different stations. Each observation produced a height calculation, and the numbers were remarkably consistent, ranging from 28,990 to 29,026 feet, with a mean of 29,002 feet.
Around 1852, a mathematician named Radhanath Sikdar, working as the chief computer at the survey’s Calcutta office, informed the current Surveyor General, Andrew Waugh, that Peak XV appeared to be the highest mountain ever measured. One colorful (though possibly embellished) account from a 1928 speech describes Sikdar rushing into Waugh’s office and exclaiming, “Sir, I have discovered the highest mountain on the earth.” The native Indian mathematicians who performed these calculations were rarely credited by name in official records.
Why Andrew Waugh Chose the Name “Everest”
Andrew Waugh had succeeded George Everest as Surveyor General of India. When it came time to give Peak XV an official English name, Waugh faced a problem. In an 1856 letter to the Royal Geographical Society, he explained: “I was taught by my respected chief and predecessor, Colonel Sir George Everest to assign to every geographical object its true local or native appellation. But here is a mountain, most probably the highest in the world, without any local name that we can discover, whose native appellation, if it has any, will not very likely be ascertained before we are allowed to penetrate into Nepal.”
Nepal was closed to outsiders at the time, and Waugh claimed he could find no widely known local name for the peak. So he proposed naming it after his former boss. The Royal Geographical Society made it official in 1865.
George Everest Didn’t Want the Honor
George Everest actually argued against using his name. He had long advocated for using indigenous place names rather than European ones on maps of South Asia. He also raised a practical concern: his surname was difficult to write or pronounce in South Asian languages. His objections were overruled.
There’s another layer of irony here. Almost everyone today mispronounces the name. George Everest said his surname “EVE-rest,” with a long E in the first syllable, rhyming with “peeve.” The mountain is almost universally called “EVER-est” or “EV-rest,” with a short E like the word “weather.” To honor the Royal Geographical Society’s original intentions, you’d technically say “Mount EVE-rest.”
The Mountain Already Had a Name
Waugh’s claim that no local name existed was wrong. Tibetans had called the mountain Chomolungma (also spelled Qomolangma, pronounced “CHOH-moh-LUHNG-muh”) for centuries. The name translates to “Goddess Mother of the World.” In the early 20th century, Swedish explorer Sven Hedin brought this name to wider European attention, but it had actually appeared on a map published in Paris in 1733 by the French geographer D’Anville. The name predated the British survey by well over a hundred years.
Nepal also has its own name for the peak: Sagarmatha, combining “Sagar” (sky) and “Matha” (forehead). The earliest known written appearance of this word dates to 1938, in an article by the Nepali historian Baburam Acharya in the literary journal Sharda. He described it as a local name that was unknown even in Kathmandu at the time. The name gained official status in the 1960s, when China and Nepal were demarcating their shared Himalayan border, which runs directly through the summit.
Three Names for One Mountain
Today the peak carries all three names depending on who you ask. China uses Qomolangma (the transliteration of the Tibetan). Nepal uses Sagarmatha, and it’s the namesake of the national park and administrative zone on the Nepali side. Most of the English-speaking world still calls it Mount Everest, the name given by a colonial survey that couldn’t find a local name that had already been on a French map for over a century.