South America gets its name from two pieces: “America,” a name coined in 1507 to honor the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci, and “South,” a geographic label added decades later when mapmakers realized the Western Hemisphere contained two distinct continents. The story involves a German cartographer, a poet with a flair for Latin, and a naming choice that has been controversial for over 500 years.
Where the Name “America” Came From
In 1507, a German cartographer named Martin Waldseemüller produced a massive world map, and on it he printed a word that had never appeared on any map before: “America.” He placed it on the southern landmass of the Western Hemisphere, right across what we now call Brazil. The name was a Latinized version of “Amerigo,” the first name of the Florentine explorer Amerigo Vespucci.
Vespucci’s key contribution wasn’t discovering new land. Christopher Columbus had already crossed the Atlantic in 1492. What Vespucci did was recognize that the lands Columbus reached were not part of Asia, as Columbus believed, but an entirely separate continent. This was a radical idea at the time. Waldseemüller and his collaborator, the poet Matthias Ringmann, decided this insight deserved recognition. In the introduction to their accompanying book, the “Cosmographiae Introductio,” they proposed naming the new lands after Vespucci.
Ringmann Latinized “Amerigo” into “Americus,” then feminized it to “America.” The reasoning was that other continents, Europa and Asia, already carried feminine names drawn from legendary women. “America” followed the same convention. The full title of Waldseemüller’s map translates to “A drawing of the whole earth following the tradition of Ptolemy and the travels of Amerigo Vespucci and others,” making the tribute explicit.
Why Vespucci and Not Columbus
This naming choice has bothered people for centuries. Ralph Waldo Emerson called Vespucci a “thief” for receiving credit he didn’t deserve. As early as 1535, the Spanish scholar Michael Servetus called the name “America” a flat-out mistake. Even Vespucci’s own nephew Giovanni published a map in 1523 and conspicuously left the name off it.
Different regions clung to their own names. Spain continued calling the lands “the Indies” well into the colonial era. The French scholar Postel proposed “Atlantis” in 1561. One German mapmaker, Oertel, tried labeling North America “Columbana” while keeping “America” only for the south. None of these alternatives stuck. There is even a theory, championed by the French scholar Jules Marcou in 1875, that “America” didn’t come from Vespucci at all but from “Amerrique,” the name of an indigenous group, a district, and a mountain range in Nicaragua that Columbus may have encountered on his fourth voyage in 1502. This theory remains a minority view, but it has never been fully disproven.
The practical reason Columbus lost out is simple: Waldseemüller’s 1507 map was widely distributed, printed in about 1,000 copies. Once the name appeared in print on a major reference map, it spread through European intellectual circles faster than anyone could object.
How “South” Got Added
On Waldseemüller’s original 1507 map, “America” referred only to the southern landmass. The northern part of the hemisphere wasn’t labeled with the name at all, partly because Europeans still understood the geography poorly and partly because Vespucci’s voyages had focused on the coast of present-day South America.
That changed in 1538, when the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator published a world map on a double heart-shaped projection. This was the first map to apply the name “America” to both the northern and southern landmasses, and the first to clearly distinguish them as separate continents. Mercator labeled them accordingly, and the convention of “North America” and “South America” as distinct geographic units took root from there. Before this, the Spanish had referred to much of the region as “Tierra Firme” (meaning “firm land” or “mainland”), a vague label covering everything from Central America through the northern coast of South America.
The directional prefix was straightforward geography: the southern continent sits almost entirely below the equator, extending from roughly 12 degrees north latitude all the way to Cape Horn at 56 degrees south. Once mapmakers agreed both halves of the hemisphere would share the name “America,” the simplest way to tell them apart was north and south.
Why the Name Stuck
Names on maps have a self-reinforcing power. Once Waldseemüller printed “America” in 1507 and Mercator extended it across both continents in 1538, every subsequent mapmaker who copied their work carried the name forward. By the late 1500s, “America” was the standard term across most of Europe. The Spanish held out longest with “the Indies,” but even they eventually adopted the international convention.
Waldseemüller himself may have had second thoughts. On a later map from 1513, he removed the name “America” and replaced it with “Terra Incognita” (unknown land). But by then, the 1507 map had already done its work. The Library of Congress, which now holds the sole surviving copy of that map, has called it “America’s birth certificate.” It was purchased in 2003 for $10 million, making it one of the most valuable maps in existence.
So the short answer: “America” comes from a 16th-century tribute to Amerigo Vespucci, the explorer who figured out the New World was actually new. “South” was tacked on a generation later, when cartographers realized they were dealing with two continents, not one, and needed a way to distinguish them on a map.