Several countries carry a colour inside their name. Montenegro means “Black Mountain” (Crna Gora in Montenegrin) after the dark forests of Mount Lovćen; Sudan and South Sudan come from the Arabic bilād as-sūdān, “land of the blacks”; Eritrea takes its name from the Greek Erythra Thalassa, the Red Sea; Belarus means “White Rus’”; Brazil is named after brazilwood, a tree whose Portuguese name is usually explained as “red like an ember”; and Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark rather than an independent country, was given its green name by Erik the Red around 985. Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Equatorial Guinea and Papua New Guinea belong to the same group if the leading derivation of “Guinea” from a Berber word for “black” is right, though that origin is not settled. None of these names stands alone: each belongs to a family of related place names in its region, and the family usually explains the colour better than the country does.
Crna Gora, Karadağ and Mali i Zi: one Black Mountain in three languages
Montenegro is a Venetian calque. Venetians, whose republic took Kotor under its protection in 1420, translated the Slavic phrase Crna Gora (Црна Гора), “black mountain”, into their own dialect as monte negro, and that is the form English borrowed. Accounts of both the country and the mountain agree that the black refers to Mount Lovćen as it looked when it was covered in dense evergreen forest. Lovćen rises straight behind the coastal town of Kotor and the twisting Bay of Kotor; its two main summits are Štirovnik at 1,749 m and Jezerski vrh at 1,657 m.
The name first appears in 13th-century charters of Serbia’s Nemanjić rulers, one of them usually dated to 1276. At first it covered only a small strip of land, and it spread to the wider mountain region in the 15th century, after the Crnojević family took power in Upper Zeta. The country has kept the colour through every change of regime: the People’s Republic of Montenegro in 1945, the Socialist Republic in 1963, the Republic of Montenegro in 1992, and simply Montenegro since 22 October 2007, a year after independence. Today it covers 13,883 km², and its 2023 census counted about 624,000 citizens.
What makes this a family rather than a single name is that the neighbours translated it too. Albanians call the country Mali i Zi, again “black mountain”. Under Ottoman rule the province was the Karadağ Sancağı, the Sanjak of the Black Mountain, created in 1514, and Karadağ remains the Turkish name of the country. And Crna Gora was never unique to the Adriatic. North of Skopje, straddling North Macedonia, Kosovo and Serbia, lies Skopska Crna Gora, a range whose highest peak, Ramno, reaches 1,651 m; the Ottomans called it Karadağ as well, and in Albanian it is Malësia e Karadakut. “Black mountain” was a common descriptive label for any dark, forested massif, and the one above Kotor simply became a state.
Bilad al-Sudan, Guinea and Aithiopia: three words for the people south of the Sahara
The second family is older and much larger. Medieval Arab geographers called the whole belt of Africa south of the Sahara bilād as-sūdān (بلاد السودان), “the land of the blacks”, after the dark skin of its inhabitants. The phrase covered the lands south of the Sahel, and ecologists still call the grassland belt there the Sudanian savanna, which runs from the Ethiopian Highlands to the Atlantic between the Sahel to the north and the forests to the south. The modern Republic of the Sudan, independent on 1 January 1956, took the regional name for itself. South Sudan inherited it on 9 July 2011, after 98.8% voted for independence in a January 2011 referendum. A third, French Sudan, was the colony on the Upper Niger that became the Republic of Mali in 1960.
Berber had its own version. In Berber, aginaw means “black” and Akal n-Iguinawen “land of the blacks”, and the widely held view is that the Portuguese borrowed the related term Ghinawen, “the burnt people”, as Guineus in the mid-15th century, for the peoples south of the Senegal River. King John II of Portugal styled himself Lord of Guinea from 1481. A rival theory, first put forward by Leo Africanus in 1526, derives Guinea from Djenné, the trading city on the Upper Niger. Neither derivation is proven, but if the Berber one is right, four modern states carry a colour word: Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Equatorial Guinea and, at second hand, Papua New Guinea. The Spanish explorer Yñigo Ortiz de Retez called that Pacific island New Guinea in 1545 because he thought its people resembled the Africans of the Guinea coast.
Greek supplied the third word. Aithiops was explained in antiquity as “burnt face”, from aithō, “I burn”, and ōps, “face”; as an adjective it meant “red-brown”. Herodotus used “Aethiopian” mainly for the people south of Egypt, above all Nubia; Ptolemy in the 2nd century AD stretched Aethiopia to sub-Saharan Africa as a whole; and after King Ezana of Aksum conquered Meroë around 330 AD and took the title “king of Ethiopia”, the name passed to his highland kingdom. Ethiopian tradition prefers a legendary king, Ityopp’is, named in the 15th-century Book of Axum. So Sudan, Guinea and Ethiopia are three languages’ attempts at the same description, and only one of them, Sudan, is beyond dispute.
Erythra Thalassa, Karadeniz and Akdeniz: seas named by a colour compass
Eritrea is named after a sea that is itself named after a colour. Ancient Greek writers called the waters between Africa and Arabia Erythra Thalassa (Ἐρυθρὰ Θάλασσα), from erythros, “red”, which became the Latin Mare Rubrum and the English Red Sea. Italy revived the Greek form in 1890 when it organised its coastal possessions as the Colonia Eritrea, and the name survived British administration, Ethiopian rule, the 1993 independence referendum and the 1997 constitution. Massawa, the old Red Sea port that served as the colony’s first capital until the government moved up to Asmara in 1897, is one of the hottest coastal towns on Earth, with an average temperature of nearly 30 °C. The country covers about 117,600 km².
Why the sea is red is a separate puzzle. One explanation points to seasonal blooms of the reddish cyanobacterium Trichodesmium erythraeum near the surface. A theory favoured by some modern scholars is directional: in several old naming systems, colours stood for points of the compass, and red meant south. Herodotus used “Red Sea” and “Southern Sea” interchangeably. The same scheme would explain the Black Sea as the northern sea. Its Turkish name, Karadeniz, is a literal “Black Sea”, and the earlier Greek Póntos Áxeinos probably renders an Iranian word for “dark-coloured”. In the Turkic version of the colour compass, black is north, red south, white west and green or light blue east. On that reading the Mediterranean is Akdeniz, “White Sea”, in Turkish, and Bulgarian and Serbian call the Aegean the White Sea, though the directional theory is contested.
White, Black and Red Ruthenia: the map Belarus came from
Belarus belongs to the same colour-coded map. Its name comes from Belaya Rus’, “White Rus’”, and medieval Western writers divided the lands of the East Slavs into a whole set of coloured Ruthenias. Black Ruthenia lay on the upper Neman around Novogrudok, Grodno and Slonim. Red Ruthenia, first named in a Polish chronicle of 1321, was the south-west of old Kievan Rus’ around Przemyśl and Belz, and later took in Lviv. The Polish chronicler Jan of Czarnków recorded “Albae Russiae, Poloczk dicto”, White Russia called Polotsk, in 1381, and the Englishman Sir Jerome Horsey used White Russia for the Belarusian lands in the late 16th century.
Nobody agrees on why White Rus’ was white, and historians still weigh four rival theories. One says the lands were settled by Slavs christianised early, in contrast to pagan Baltic Black Ruthenia. Another points to the white clothing of the local peasants. A third says White Rus’ meant the cities of Polotsk, Vitebsk and Mogilev that the Tatars never conquered, and a fourth uses the colour-compass idea, with white standing for the west. That last theory links Belarus to Akdeniz and the White Sea. The tsars styled themselves rulers of “all the Russias”, Great, Little and White; the Soviet republic was Byelorussia, a form used officially until 1991, when the Republic of Belarus took over.
Grœnland and Terra do Brasil: colours chosen to sell a coast
The last family is the most modern in spirit: colours used as marketing. According to the Icelandic sagas, Erik the Red, himself named for his hair and beard, was outlawed from Iceland around 982 for three years after a string of killings, and spent his exile exploring the coast to the west. He rounded the southern cape and found sheltered, ice-free fjords that looked farmable, and in the summer of 985 he returned with colonists. The Saga of Erik the Red says he called the country Grœnland because people would be attracted there if it had a favourable name. Erik built his farm, Brattahlíð, at what is now Qassiarsuk, and died there around 1003.
The name was half true. The grassy slopes at Qassiarsuk really are green in summer, but the island as a whole covers 2,166,086 km², and the ice sheet takes up 1,755,637 km² of it, about 81%. The Norse farmed only two main sheltered pockets of it, the Eastern Settlement near today’s Qaqortoq and the Western Settlement near Nuuk, both on the south-west coast. Greenlanders themselves call the island Kalaallit Nunaat, “land of the Kalaallit”, a name with no colour in it at all. More on the island itself is in our guide to Greenland, the world’s largest island.
Brazil is a colour name at one remove. Portugal’s official name for the land Pedro Álvares Cabral reached in 1500 was Terra da Santa Cruz, the Land of the Holy Cross, but sailors and merchants called it Terra do Brasil after its most profitable early export: pau-brasil, brazilwood, which yields a deep red dye prized by Europe’s textile makers. The usual etymology of brasil is brasa, “ember”, plus a suffix, giving “red like an ember”, though some argue this is itself a folk etymology for an Arabic or Asian word for a red plant. All through the 16th century Indigenous people, mostly Tupi, felled the tree along the coast and sold the timber to European traders, and popular usage pushed the saintly name aside. In Guarani the country is Pindorama, “land of the palm trees”. Greenland was named to attract settlers; Brazil was named by the people who came to extract its red wood. If you want to see how outsiders’ names like these differ from what a country calls itself, our piece on exonyms and endonyms traces the same split from Montenegro to Kalaallit Nunaat.