Places change names for a small number of recurring reasons: the end of an empire, a decision to spell a name the way locals say it, a diplomatic bargain, a rebranding aimed at foreigners, or a political gesture. The changes that stick are almost always the ones where the people who live there did the renaming. The ones that do not stick are usually renamings imposed from outside — which is why a 1689 atlas is easier to read than you would expect, and why some of 2025's changes are visible only to Americans.
Names that fell with empires
The largest single wave of renaming in modern history came with decolonisation, and it followed independence rather than accompanying it — often by years, because new states had more pressing work first.
Ceylon became Sri Lanka in 1972, at the same moment it declared itself a republic and cut the last constitutional tie to the British crown. Rhodesia, named for Cecil Rhodes, became Zimbabwe in 1980, taking its name from the stone ruins of Great Zimbabwe. Dahomey became Benin in 1975. Upper Volta — a name that described a French administrative unit and nothing else — became Burkina Faso in 1984 under Thomas Sankara, in a coinage drawn from two of the country's languages meaning roughly "land of upright people."
And the ones that did not last
Some of it was less about colonialism than about the government of the day. Mobutu Sese Seko renamed the Democratic Republic of the Congo as Zaire in 1971 as part of an "authenticity" campaign; the name lasted exactly as long as he did, and the country reverted in 1997. Burma became Myanmar in 1989 by decree of a military government, which is why usage remains split to this day: the change was real but its authorship was contested, and several governments and news organisations declined to follow.
Spellings that came home
India ran the most sustained programme of restoring pre-colonial forms, one city at a time. Bombay became Mumbai in 1995, after the goddess Mumbadevi. Madras became Chennai in 1996. Calcutta became Kolkata in 2001, bringing the spelling in line with the Bengali pronunciation that had always been used locally. Bangalore was formally notified as Bengaluru in 2014.
None of these were inventions. In every case the "new" name was the local one, and the old one was an English approximation of it that had hardened into officialdom.
The same logic operates on romanisation. Peking became Beijing internationally around 1979, when China's Xinhua agency switched to the pinyin system for external use; the Chinese name never changed at all, only the alphabet it was rendered in. Kiev became Kyiv in English through a similar shift, transliterating from Ukrainian instead of Russian — adopted by the US Board on Geographic Names in 2006 and by most major news organisations after 2019.
Rebrandings aimed outward
A different category: countries that were content with their own name but unhappy with the version foreigners used.
Turkey asked the UN in 2022 to be called Türkiye, which is what Turkish speakers had always called it, and which avoids the English homograph for the bird. Swaziland became Eswatini in 2018 on the fiftieth anniversary of independence, King Mswati III noting that the old name was constantly confused with Switzerland. Cape Verde asked in 2013 to be called Cabo Verde in all languages. Côte d'Ivoire made the same request in 1986, asking not to be translated as Ivory Coast — a request many languages still ignore.
These requests are made country by country and publisher by publisher, and they land unevenly. Türkiye moved quickly through the UN, international sport and diplomatic usage, and slowly through everyday English. Cabo Verde is standard in UN documents and rare in conversation. The lesson is that a state can change its own name unilaterally but can only request that other languages follow, and languages are not run by anyone who can answer.
Cities do this too, usually without a government behind it. Istanbul had been the common Turkish name for centuries before a 1930 postal regulation made it the only one accepted for international mail — the mechanism that finally retired Constantinople abroad. That history is worth reading in full in our piece on the origin of the name Istanbul.
The Czech Republic registered Czechia with the UN in 2016, not as a replacement for the formal name but as the short form that had been missing, the way France is short for the French Republic. It took years to catch on, and the country's own institutions were slow to adopt it. That is typical: a rebranding without a political rupture behind it moves slowly, if at all. The state itself dates only to the peaceful split of Czechoslovakia in 1993.
A name settled by treaty
One case stands alone, because the name was the entire dispute. Greece objected for nearly three decades to its northern neighbour calling itself Macedonia, on the grounds that Macedonia is also a Greek region and the name implied a territorial claim. Greece blocked NATO and EU accession over it.
The Prespa Agreement of June 2018 resolved it: the country became North Macedonia, Greece dropped its veto, and the change entered into force on 12 February 2019. It is the clearest example of a place name functioning as a bargaining chip with a measurable price — in this case, membership of two international organisations.
Waters nobody has agreed on
Sea names are harder than land names, because seas rarely belong to anyone. The result is a set of disputes that have simply never resolved.
Japan calls the water between it and the Korean peninsula the Sea of Japan; South Korea calls it the East Sea and North Korea the Korean East Sea. The name was recorded as "Japan Sea" in the International Hydrographic Organization's 1929 reference at a time when Korea was under Japanese rule and had no voice in the matter, which is the heart of the Korean objection. South Korea raised it formally at the UN in 1992, and the reference work has been unrevisable ever since.
The Persian Gulf has carried that name in Arab as well as Persian sources since at least the tenth century; "Arabian Gulf" emerged in the 1960s with Arab nationalism. Iran treats the matter as non-negotiable, marks a National Persian Gulf Day on 30 April, and has threatened airlines over the label. In May 2025 the US administration considered switching federal usage and dropped the idea.
The South China Sea gets called the East Sea in Vietnam and the West Philippine Sea in the Philippines, at least for the parts each claims. In every one of these cases the water is fine. It is the label that will not settle.
Mountains with more than one name
The highest mountain on Earth is a case study in itself. It is Sagarmatha in Nepali and Chomolungma in Tibetan, and it was named Mount Everest in 1865 by the Surveyor General of India after his predecessor George Everest — who objected, on the reasonable grounds that his name could not be written in Devanagari and that a local name should have been found. It was, eventually, by everyone except the English-speaking world.
Australia's Ayers Rock, named in 1873 after a South Australian premier, was given the dual name Uluru/Ayers Rock in 1993 and reversed in 2002 so that the Anangu name comes first. In the United States, Harney Peak in South Dakota became Black Elk Peak in 2016, and Clingmans Dome in the Great Smoky Mountains became Kuwohi in 2024 at the request of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. Alaska's Barrow became Utqiaġvik in 2016 by municipal vote.
The American renamings of 2025 and 2026
The most recent wave runs in the opposite direction to almost everything above, and it is worth being precise about what it did.
Executive Order 14172, signed on 20 January 2025, renamed the American portion of the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America and reverted Denali to Mount McKinley, undoing a 2015 restoration of the Koyukon name. A further order on 27 August 2026 renamed Lake Ontario as Lake America, three days after US-Canada trade talks collapsed.
All three changed the federal names database and therefore American federal publications, and all three propagated to consumer maps within days, because Google follows each country's official database for users in that country. None of them changed anything outside American federal reach. Mexico, Cuba, Canada and most of the world use the older names, and in each case the displaced name was the older one — two of the three Indigenous in origin.
What actually determines whether a name sticks
Sort the list above and one pattern does most of the work. Renamings initiated by the people who live in a place hold: Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe, Mumbai, Kolkata, Eswatini, Uluru, Kuwohi. Renamings imposed on a place from outside, or by a government the population did not choose, remain contested for decades or collapse outright: Zaire lasted 26 years, Burma and Myanmar are both still in use after 35 years, and Ceylon tea is still called Ceylon tea.
The second pattern is that names are downstream of paperwork. A country changes its name by writing to the UN; a feature changes its name in a national database; a map company reads the database. Every step is mechanical, and none of it can reach across a border. That is the whole reason a place can genuinely have two names at once — see who decides what places are called for how those pieces fit together, and our collection on cities with multiple names for the ones that never picked.