Surprisingly Literal Country Names 

Let me know what other surprising literal country names I may have missed out!

Me, someone who speaks Spanish: these are just as obvious South Africa.

I've always found the USA painfully literal, like it is a union of states that are in the american continent...

Tbh if you speak any Latin based language all of these are pretty obvious

Equatorial Guinea: am I a joke to you?

As a Spanish speaking person, all three of these are just descriptions, in all three cases it's just normal words in Spanish.

Don't get any more literal than the United States of America.

In Icelandic Montenegro is called Svartfjallaland, which is literally Black Mountain Land, and also sounds like something from Tolkien

People like to call us North Korea because we’re the northern part of Korea

7:14 You seriously didn't call one of the most famous republics in history a kingdom ? By the Doge, what is happening ?

The us state of Vermont actually has a similar etymology as montenegro. Vermont or vert mont is green mountain in french

Venetian and all the other "dialects" of Italy are not variations of Italian, they're languages coming directly from Latin 😊

Netherlands is also quite a literal name. 'Nether' or 'Neder' in (old)Dutch means low. So the Netherlands means the low lands.

Another fact: Montenegro may be a venetian name, but "Black Mountain" is also written "Monte Negro" in Spanish, so these 3 countries had no mistery for me as a Spaniard :((

1:01 Central African "Republuc." Congratulations sir.

As for the Venetian language: It is NOT a “variation of” Italian. In fact, because of how divided the Italian Peninsula has been for over a millennium, an “Italian language” wasn’t a thing until after unification in the mid-19th century. What we know as “Italian” is really a variation of the Tuscan language. (It’s kind of like how Martin Luther created the German language. I’ll plug that video of yours in here: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-j5bicNvdiBs.html Also, as Enric pointed out, Venice was a Republic, not a Kingdom.

I’m so bad at geography that I never realized that Ecuador was in the equator until I saw the thumbnail lol

The province of Newfoundland, Canada, is literally just phrase "new found land"

Just for fact check to people who isn't familiar with Jurassic Park Movies, "Isla Nublar" is just the fictional island near Costa Rica where the park is located in the movies, it is based on the REAL Isla del Coco "Cocos Island" :)

Suggestion: Names that sound literal but aren't

Equatorial Guinea: *_sweats nervously_*

Poland - in Polish, "pole" means field, Poland, land of fields. There's also a city in Poland called Opole, literally "Oh, a field!".

Isla Nublar is a tourist trap. So many delicious tourists...

Well in portuguese ALL of those are pretty obvious, so yeah, you didn't got me this time

Well the idea of the region called Ecuador came first after the French geodesic expedition in which they were pinpointing the exact location of the equator. Naming it the República del Ecuador (republic of the equator) Had that not happened, the country's name would've remained something related to Quito

This video got me to giggle lots of times. Thank you for posting it!

Watching from Romania love ur content since 2016

Another fantastic video, thank you!

Spanish tends to be quite literal, for example in México, 6 states have literal names and another 4 are names from people. Many of the US states have unique names, but there are still those that are named after a person, and four of them are literal (and in Spanish).

Great video (as per usual)!!

Morocco's endonym is literally "The West Kingdom."

Me: (speaks spanish) The video:... Me: 🤨

You forgot about Central Asian "-stan" countries that are all named after the major ethnic groups of each (Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Tajiks, and Turkmen). The names of each of these groups is combined with the Persian suffix "-stan" which means "land of". These names are of recent vintage and part of the Soviet policy to give every ethnicity a homeland, so it's fitting that the names derived from the ethnicities. Afghanistan is somewhat similar in that it uses the term "Afghan", which was historically used to refer to what we call the Pashtuns today. The term Afghanistan had been used for many centuries. Pakistan isn't similar as it is from the Persian/Urdu term for "land of the pure", rather than for an ethnicity.

You explained my country s name, never saw it coming, made my day. You are awesome. Greetings from Costa Rica

Me, a native spanish speaker: Nice, finally I can learn new things! Name Explain: Equator, Black Mountain, Rich Coast, like and suscribe

Isn't Isla Nublar where Jurrasic Park 3 was set?

My partner's family is from Ecuador, and he lived there for a while at age 9, so of course I'm interested in this topic! My mom spent 2 years in Bolivia, so I was extra excited to hear about Simón Bolivar, too.

Terra Australias. Latin students like me: Its show time.

6:30 holy shit he actually said Lovćen correctly

OHH another one would be Puerto Rico from the Caribbean. It literally just means "Rich Port" which kinda makes sense cause during the 1500's, it was probably an important port to the new world, delivering all sorts of riches from central and south America back to the old world.

Isla Nublar, if I am not mistaken, was the supposed location of Jurassic Park.

8:08 Sneaky Jurassic Park reference

6:40 Montenegro is called Μαύροβουνιο and it means black mountain!

I think someone should mention Australia. Back in the Age of Discovery, people thought there had to be a giant continent far down south, called "Terra Australis". However due to the inhospitable nature of the South Pole, the furthest they could travel south was Australia, which they eventally choose as their name.

Bolivar didn’t unify South America but at least he got his own currency named after him

Great video

2:57 La Paz: Am I a joke to you?

We love you name explain

Mans spent more than 2 minutes saying why he likes the feeling of learning obvious things before actually talking about the names, that’s impressive

Could you dedicate a video or series of videos on exonyms and endonyms; such as the exonym Montenegro vs the endonym Crna Gora. I feel like it fits your channel and there would be some interesting topics there. Or I could be wrong and it's all rather pedantic....I'm sure there are some curious Endo/exonym stories though.

Fun fact #1: since a lot of the gold in Costa Rica was taken away, Costa Ricans sometimes call it Costa Pobre (which means poor coast). Fun fact #2: since many Nicaraguans have emigrated to Costa Rica in order to have a better life, sometimes Costa Ricans -sarcastically- call it Costa Nica. Fun fact #3: Costa Ricans call themselves “ticos”, so sometimes Costa Rica is called Tiquicia, which is a sort of a slang-ish word which would translate to Land of the Ticos.

Ecuador's would still be on the South Africa side of the spectrum because it sounds so similar to Equator that I thought everyone knew, or at least assumed, it was named after the Equator

Last year I drove from Albania into Montenegro. North of Shkoder the weather turned. In the heavy rains the mountains looked black. Didn't change until I drove into Bosnia.

This reminds me of the _"The Curtain was Blue"_ joke about teachers overanalyzing things

Actually, the name of "Ecuador" was not given by the spanish rulers of the land, but by french intellectuals in the XIX century. The actual territory of Ecuador was called "Real Audiencia de Quito" under spanish rule, and "Departamento del Sur" by the Gran Colombia government. The country would have been named just "Quito" if the french geodesic mission to find the center of the Earth, led by Charles Marie de la Condamine would've never occured. Also, as a matter of fact, it is different to other equator related countries, because the exact center of the Earth is in a valley near Quito.

Here's a thing: in Slavic languages, some familiar letters have very different pronunciations from English. A possible solution is to paste the word into Google Translate, listen to its pronunciation, and try to repeat. This may actually make things easier for you (like stopping you from attempting to say "r" when you see the Polish digraph "rz").

Cool video

And also Montenegro in Slavic languages is some variation of the Montenegrin word for the country "Črna Gora" meaning "Black Mountain" such as in my native language of Polish (Czarnogóra)

Argentina (literally "Land of silver"). It was named like this by Spanish in late 1500s because they believed it was full of silver. In the further years they got all types of rare metals from there, even gold and a little bit of platinum and uranium, but absolutely no silver

@0:22 it was in a small house in Surbiton, Surrey to be exact.

There is also a mountain range called the Black Mountains somewhat closer to home, in south Wales.

Where's Österreich (Austria/Eastern Reich)?

Canada is interesting too. Literally means "ground" in the indigenous dialect. Supposedly when the settlers asked what they call the land, they pointed at the ground. The native people mistook that for "what is your word for ground" pretty much and said "Canada" and it stuck.

You should do a videos on countries that have the same or similar names to their capitals.

8:05 well played sir

Hey name explain, can you make a video about the names of the peoples/kingdoms that were born after the collapse of the Roman Empire? The Franks, Vandals Visigoths, Ostrogoths, etc.. they're all fascinating names :)

And New Zealand makes sense because new zealand was discovered at the 1300’s pretty late and the word zealand is a whole lot similar to Sea Land which implies that it is an island.

As a person with minimal knowledge about other languages, these are all very obvious, like south africa or united states of america

Was looking for GameXplain, found this. Not the slightest bit dissapointed

What always surprised me was how names for a same country can be said differently through multiple languages, and sometimes not exactly mean the same thing. For example, France is, you know, known as France both in french and in english, and it's simply a name derived from the Franks (in french "les Francs"). However in german, it's called "Frankreich" which means the empire of Franks. It adds information for seemingly no reason, yet they still keep it different. It's the same case for the country of Germany. In english, the name comes from the German tribes. In french however, we call it "Allemagne", based on a specific confederation of Germans called the Alemanni Tribes. And "Deutschland" in german would simply mean "the land of the people" (though using the old meaning of Deutsch, with the current meaning it would mostly mean "land of the Deutsch people"). Fascinating.

when ever the teacher would make us draw a world map from memory i put the equator where ecuador is!

Isla Nublar: Welcome, to Jurassic Park.

Did you do a video on the names countries used to be named? like Congo used to be Zaire?

Since my mother tongue is Spanish, this weren't painstakingly obvious, they were self-explanatory 😂😂😂 Cool video, though, I still learned some miscellaneous stuff

Wait does that mean the Virgin Islands... Have no alcohol on them?

I'd love to see a video about Dihya, the Amazigh warrior queen.

There is another place called Black Mountain. A borough in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, is called Mustamäe (Musta = of black/black's, noun: must=black; mäe = of mountain/mountain's, noun: mägi=mountain).

The pacific or should i say Polynesian islands have some interesting names too. Sāmoa - sacred center Tokelau - north wind (located north of Sāmoa) Tonga - south ( located south of Sāmoa) Niue - middle ( located between Sāmoa and Tonga) Rarotonga - down south ( main island of Cook Island located south of most of the Cook Islands island) And Hawaii got its name from Savaii which is the name of the biggest island in Sāmoa.

Bahrain in arabic is بحرين which means "two seas" because the island is located between two seas.

I'm still trying to find out where Old Mexico is

Can you do a video on languages who put surnames before given names? @nameexplain

Thank you for the JP EasterEgg ✌😘

as a huge Jurassic Park fan, the Isla Nublar reference made me smile :) there really IS (sort of) a real Isla Nublar, though--it's just called Cocos Island instead ;) incidentally, though probably alot of you know this already, "Isla Nublar" (and all the other Jurassic Park islands, like "Isla Sorna") isn't grammatically-correct Spanish; for the proper meaning of "cloud island", it SHOULD be written out as something like "Isla de Nublada"

other similarly named countries: Cabo Verde (Green Cape, because theres's a lot of green in a cape), Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast, because ivory was traded by the coast), Puerto Rico (Rich Port)

A cousin of sorts of Equador is Equatorial Guinea, named for its location near both the equator and Gulf of Guinea, and Costa Rica's cousins are Gold Coast and Ivory Coast, so named because in colonial times gold and Ivory were shipped from their respective ports after being obtained from their interiors

9:47 sees a diploma of my country being given to some random guy. Me: (proceeds to smash his windows in san jose, the capital of costa rica)

I was surprised that The Netherlands didn't make your list. I was guessing that they would take the number one spot.

Nobody mentions the fact that the US has a pretty obvious name too.

The country Somalia is made from 2 Somalian words. I felt very stupid when I discovered it, as the language was my native language. One of the words is “soo” meaning go or do (certain thing). And the other one is “maal”, which means milk a cow or camel. Since the country was full of home animals it was it was considered as riches if you have allot. The word maal is sometimes used as crops or investments too. So basically it means go milk or go invest, as in make your family richer or proud.

The Black Garden on the Mountain is not on the Black Mountain. While the "on the Mountain" part is translated into Russian, Armenian, and Azeri (Nagorny, Leṙnayin, Daǧlıq), the "Black Garden" part (Karabagh) sounds pretty similar in all three.

3:40 I KNEW IT

3:02 Are you sure that’s a photo of the Galápagos?

Singapore from Malay word Singapura which Singa means lion and pura means city hence the city state is nicknamed lion city. Btw Montenegro’s name in Chinese 黑山 is a direct translation of its meaning from Italian origin where 黑 is black and 山 being mountain ;)

“Central African Republic and South Africa” Sad South Sudan Noises

You should make a video about Latvia

I mean...I live in Peopleland, and our neighbours are: Eastern Realm Personland Fieldland Flat Borderland Lowlands Furious People Land Free People Land Slash-And-Burn Agriculture Land Only two of those are sort of interesting. I feel like most country names are disappointingly literal, some just hide it better than others :v

7:13 Venice was not a Kingdom, its famous for being "the most serene republic"

In Polish Montenegro is literally called Black Mountain "Czarnogóra" (Czarno - Black, Góra - Mountain)

If we’re including cities and stuff then Dongjing (Chinese word for Tokyo), Beijing, something like half the Chinese provinces, Montana, and the Mediterranean Sea are pretty literal

3:02 Am I the only who thought this looks surprisingly similar to the peninsula at the shortest international border between Morocco and Spain? Edit: I can't put timestamp there's a glitch help