At least eighteen of today’s countries are named after a geographic feature. Rivers account for most of them: India (the Indus), Nigeria and Niger (the Niger), the Democratic Republic of the Congo and its neighbour the Republic of the Congo (the Congo), Paraguay, Uruguay, Senegal, The Gambia and Jordan all carry a river’s name. Two are named after single mountains, Montenegro (Mount Lovćen, the “Black Mountain”) and Kenya (Mount Kenya), and Sierra Leone after the “Lion Mountains” above Freetown. Costa Rica and Côte d’Ivoire are named after stretches of coast, Cameroon after a river estuary full of shrimp, and Chad after a lake. Indonesia borrows the Indus at one remove. Each belongs to a family of related names for provinces, peoples and old colonies that shows how the name moved from feature to state.
Sindhu, Hindush and Indía: the family behind India, Sindh and Indonesia
The oldest name family on the list grows from the Sanskrit word sindhu, which meant a river, a flood or even the sea, and which became the proper name of the Indus. The Vedas call the Punjab Sapta Sindhu, the land of seven rivers; the Zoroastrian Avesta renders the same phrase as Hapta Hindu, because Old Persian turned an initial s into h. When Darius I pushed Persian rule into the Indus Valley after about 518 BCE, his inscriptions listed a province called Hindush, the empire’s easternmost.
From there the word split into branches. Greek dropped the h and produced Indós for the river and Indía for the country beyond it, which Latin passed on as India; the name appears in Old English by the 9th century. Persian added the suffix -stan to make Hindustan, the “land of the Indus”, used as a Persian name for India since at least the 3rd century CE. Meanwhile the original form survives almost unchanged in Sindh, the Pakistani province on the lower river, which formally changed its spelling from Sind to Sindh in 1988.
The family grew again in the 19th century. In 1850 the English ethnologist George Windsor Earl proposed “Indunesians” for the people of the Indian Archipelago, and James Richardson Logan adopted Indonesia, India plus the Greek nesos, “island”, as a geographic term. Nationalists took it up after 1900 as a name free of Dutch rule. So a river that rises in Tibet and now flows mostly through Pakistan has lent its name to a country of 17,000 islands. India itself has two official short names: the Constituent Assembly adopted Bharat alongside India in 1949, and the full story is in our guide to why India is called India.
Niger and Nigeria: one river, two republics
The European name of the Niger, a river about 4,180 km long, came from the north. Pliny the Elder mentioned a West African river called Nigris, and Ptolemy described a wadi Gir in modern Algeria with a “Ni-Gir” to its south. The modern spelling was first recorded by Leo Africanus in 1550. Linguists broadly agree it does not come from Latin niger, “black”, as was once assumed; the likelier source is the Tuareg phrase egerew n-igerewen, “river of rivers”, used around Timbuktu.
For centuries European maps used Niger only for the middle river in today’s Mali and called the lower course the Quorra, not realising they were the same water. Only after Mungo Park’s journeys did the name stretch to the delta. In the Scramble for Africa, Britain and France both took the river’s name. On 8 January 1897 the journalist Flora Shaw coined “Nigeria” for the British territories, beating alternatives such as Central Sudan. The French colony upstream simply became Niger, so two neighbours now share one river’s name.
Kongo, Nzere and Zaire: how a kingdom named two Congos
The Congo family runs in the opposite direction to most: the river was named after people, and the countries after the river. When Portuguese ships under Diogo Cão reached its mouth in the early 1480s, the south bank belonged to the Kingdom of Kongo, named after the Bakongo, an endonym said to mean “hunters”, though that origin is uncertain.
A local name for the river survived alongside it. The Portuguese called it Zaire, from the Kikongo nzere, short for nzadi o nzere, “the river swallowing rivers”. Both names ended up on national maps. French Congo became the Republic of the Congo, capital Brazzaville; the Belgian Congo became independent in 1960 as another Republic of the Congo and is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Between 1971 and 1997 it was the Republic of Zaire, taking the river’s other name. At 4,700 km, the Congo is the world’s ninth-longest river and the longest on this list.
Guaraní “y” for water: Paraguay, Uruguay and the Río de la Plata basin
In South America the family resemblance is grammatical. Both Paraguay and Uruguay end in the Guaraní y, “water” or “river”, and both countries are named after the rivers that bound them. The meaning of Paraguay is uncertain. One reading is paraguá + y, “feather-crown of waters”; another is Payaguá-y, “river of the Payaguá people”. A third reads it as “sea which originates from the river”, and none has displaced the others.
The Paraguay River, about 2,621 km long, rises in Brazil’s Mato Grosso, crosses the Pantanal and cuts the country of Paraguay in two: the semi-arid Gran Chaco to the west and the forested east, where more than 96% of Paraguayans live, with Asunción on its bank. Uruguay’s link to its river is written into its official name, República Oriental del Uruguay, the republic east of the Uruguay River. The 1,838 km Uruguay has been read as “river of the uru”, a wild bird, or “river of the uruguá”, a snail; the poet Juan Zorrilla de San Martín’s “river of painted birds” is popular but considered dubious. Both drain into one system. The Paraguay joins the Paraná, and the Paraná and Uruguay together form the Río de la Plata estuary.
Senegal, Gambia and the Volta: names from West Africa’s rivers
Three West African states took river names from Portuguese traders’ charts. The Gambia comes from the Mandinka Kambra or Kambaa, the name of the 1,120 km river that the country follows inland like a sleeve. In 1964 Prime Minister Dawda Jawara asked British geographers to keep the definite article, partly to avoid confusion with newly independent Zambia, so “The Gambia” is one of only two countries, with the Bahamas, that officially use “the” in English.
Senegal, named after the 1,086 km Senegal River that forms its border with Mauritania, has three competing etymologies: a Portuguese rendering of the Zenaga (Sanhaja) Berbers; the Serer Roog Sene, the supreme deity, plus o gal, “body of water”; or, as the priest David Boilat proposed, the Wolof sunuu gaal, “our canoe”. The two river names even merged once, in the Senegambia Confederation of 1 February 1982 to 30 September 1989. The third member of the family has lost its river name. The Volta, from Portuguese volta, “turn”, gave French Upper Volta its name in 1919, describing the country’s place on the Black, White and Red Volta headwaters. On 4 August 1984 Thomas Sankara’s government renamed it Burkina Faso, “land of incorruptible people”, one of the cases in our list of countries that changed their name.
Yardon, Transjordan and the West Bank: names that look across the Jordan
The Jordan family is built around a direction. The river, 251 km long, runs south through the Sea of Galilee to the Dead Sea, about 422 m below sea level, and the most plausible etymology is the Semitic root y-r-d, “to descend”, describing that steep fall. An alternative links it to an Egyptian word for a big river. The earliest record is “Yārdon” in the Egyptian Papyrus Anastasi I, probably from the reign of Rameses II.
Most names derived from the river describe position. The Hebrew Bible speaks of Ever ha’Yarden, “the other side of the Jordan”; early Islamic rulers had a military district, Jund al-Urdunn; the Crusaders set up the lordship of Oultrejordain. In 1921 the Emirate of Transjordan, “east of the Jordan”, was created under a League of Nations mandate. It became independent in 1946 and is today’s Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. The West Bank also takes its name from its position on the river’s western side.
Crna Gora, Kirinyaga and Serra Leoa: countries named after mountains
Montenegro’s English name is a Venetian calque of the local Crna Gora (Црна Гора), “Black Mountain”, after Mount Lovćen, whose slopes above the Bay of Kotor were once covered in dark evergreen forest. The phrase was used for several medieval regions, so its family includes Skopska Crna Gora near Skopje in North Macedonia and Užička Crna Gora in western Serbia.
Kenya is named after Mount Kenya, whose highest peak, Batian, reaches 5,199 m. The German missionary Johann Ludwig Krapf asked the mountain’s name and recorded “Kenia” and “Kegnia” from the Kamba Kĩ-Nyaa. The Kikuyu call it Kĩrĩnyaga, often explained as “the one with the ostrich”, because its black rock and white snow suggested a male ostrich’s plumage. That local form survives in Kirinyaga County on the mountain’s southern slopes, while the Kamba-derived form became the Colony of Kenya in 1920. Sierra Leone is the Atlantic version: Pedro de Sintra named the hills above modern Freetown Serra Leoa, “lioness mountains”, in 1462, and the Venetian Alvise Cadamosto’s spelling stuck on European maps.
Rich coasts, ivory, shrimp and Lake Chad: names from the shoreline
La costa rica, “the rich coast”, may date from Columbus, who reached the Caribbean shore in 1502 and reported natives wearing gold, or from Gil González Dávila, who landed on the Pacific side in 1522. Portuguese merchants divided West Africa into coasts by their exports: the Pepper or Grain Coast (Liberia), the Gold Coast (Ghana), the Slave Coast (Togo, Benin and Nigeria) and the Costa do Marfim, which in French became Côte d’Ivoire. Only the ivory name survives as a country.
Cameroon began as a river mouth. Around 1472 Fernão do Pó explored the Wouri estuary at today’s Douala, found it full of mud shrimp and called it Rio dos Camarões, “river of prawns”. Spanish made it Camarones, the German protectorate of 1884 Kamerun, and the post-1919 French and British mandates Cameroon. Chad is named after Lake Chad, and the lake’s name comes from the Kanuri word for “lake”, so in English it is effectively “Lake Lake”. Its four shoreline states are Chad, Cameroon, Niger and Nigeria, every one of them named after water. Its open water shrank from about 25,000 km² in 1960 to about 2,000 km² in 1980. For the river half of this story in more depth, see our list of countries named after rivers, and for rulers rather than landscapes, countries named after people.