Brazil is called Brazil after a tree: the name is a shortened form of the Portuguese Terra do Brasil, "Land of Brazil", after pau-brasil (brazilwood), a red-dye timber that Portuguese merchants cut along the Atlantic coast in the early 1500s. Pau means "wood" and brasil comes from brasa, "ember", itself from Old French brese, because the heartwood glows the colour of hot coals and yields a deep red dye. The derivation is not seriously disputed, though Portuguese writers of the 16th century complained loudly about it, and older legends of a mist-bound Atlantic island called Brasil complicate the word's longer history.
Pau-brasil, the ember-coloured tree of the Mata Atlântica
The tree behind the name is Paubrasilia echinata, a member of the legume family that grows naturally only in the Atlantic Forest, the Mata Atlântica, which once ran along Brazil's coast from Rio Grande do Norte in the north-east to Rio Grande do Sul in the south. It reaches about 15 metres (49 ft). Its dark brown bark flakes away in patches to show blood-red wood beneath, and its branches, leaves and even its seed pods are covered in small thorns, which is why the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck gave it the species name echinata, "hedgehog-like", in 1785. Botanists moved it into its own genus, Paubrasilia, only in 2016, so the scientific name now repeats the Portuguese common name that gave the country its own.
The Tupi people of the coast had their own word for it, ibirapitanga, from ïbi'rá pi'tãga, "reddish wood". In the north-east it was also called pau de pernambuco after the captaincy, now the state, of Pernambuco, and bowmakers still call the finest wood "Pernambuco" today.
Europeans already knew the word before they knew the tree. In the Middle Ages, Latin brasile was the trade name for a red dye made from sappanwood, an Asian relative now classed as Biancaea sappan, which reached Europe as powder at great expense from India and was used to colour luxury cloth such as velvet. When the Portuguese found a close cousin growing in abundance across the Atlantic, they simply applied the merchants' existing name. The South American wood soon became the better source, and the trade name stuck to the land that supplied it.
From Ilha de Vera Cruz to Terra do Brasil, 1500 to 1516
Brazil did not start out with a commercial name. When Pedro Álvares Cabral's fleet reached the coast on 22 April 1500, the captain called it Ilha de Vera Cruz, "Island of the True Cross", probably for the Feast of the Cross on 3 May. The name survives in two letters sent home from the landing, one by Pero Vaz de Caminha and one by Mestre João Faras. By the time the courier reached Lisbon, having followed the coast long enough to see that it was no island, the name had become Terra de Santa Cruz, "Land of the Holy Cross", which became the official form in Portuguese records. Italian merchants in Lisbon who interviewed the returning crews in 1501 wrote it down as Terra dos Papagaios, the Land of Parrots.
The change came through business. From 1502 to 1512 the Portuguese crown leased its claim to a Lisbon consortium led by the merchant Fernão de Loronha, whose main business was cutting brazilwood. By 1506 Loronha's enterprise had shipped an estimated 20,000 quintals of the wood, and by the 1510s French interlopers from the cloth ports of Normandy and Brittany were landing to cut their own. During Loronha's lease, sailors and traders started calling the coast after its cargo. This followed a Portuguese habit of naming distant places after what they sold, as with the island of Madeira ("wood") and the Ivory Coast, Gold Coast and Melegueta (pepper) Coast of West Africa.
The paper trail runs quickly from there. Duarte Pacheco Pereira's Esmeraldo de Situ Orbis, written about 1506 to 1509, already speaks of the whole coast as the "terra do Brasil" beyond the ocean. A letter from Afonso de Albuquerque to the king dated 1 April 1512 mentions "terra do brasyll". The first official use came in 1516, when King Manuel I appointed Cristóvão Jacques "governor of the parts of Brazil", and in 1530 King John III sent Martim Afonso de Sousa as captain of the fleet bound "to the land of Brazil".
The Rio d Brasil near Porto Seguro on the Cantino map
The most precise place behind the name is a river. The Cantino planisphere, a Portuguese world map smuggled from Lisbon to Italy in 1502 by Alberto Cantino, an agent of the Duke of Ferrara, draws heavily on the 1501 voyage that mapped the coast. It carries the label Rio d Brasil, "River of Brazil", near Porto Seguro in today's state of Bahia, just south of the São Francisco River on the map. The name almost certainly marked a river whose banks held plenty of brazilwood, and the same label reappears on the Canerio map of about 1505. Within a few years cartographers widened it from one river to the whole coast.
The Porto Seguro area, with neighbouring Santa Cruz Cabrália, is also where Cabral's men first came ashore in 1500, and the municipality still holds the 1,151-hectare Pau-Brasil Ecological Station, created in 1997 to protect a fragment of Atlantic Forest and the brazilwood growing in it. Other mapmakers were slower to adopt the new name. In 1507 Martin Waldseemüller labelled the same landmass America, after Amerigo Vespucci, who had sailed on the 1501 mapping voyage, a story told in why America is called America. Waldseemüller's 1516 map dropped that label and called the land Brasilia sive Terra Papagalli, "Brasilia, or the Land of Parrots", which shows how quickly the dyewood name had taken over by then.
João de Barros and the case against naming a country after timber
Not everyone accepted the change. In 1552 the royal chronicler João de Barros complained that Cabral had raised a large wooden cross to mark the land, yet "this name (Brazil) became stuck in the mouth of the people". To Barros, a dyewood was a poor replacement for the wood of the cross. He urged readers to keep saying "Province of Holy Cross" so that on Judgment Day they would not be called worshippers of brazilwood. Fernão Lopes de Castanheda, around 1554, wrote that the Holy Cross name had been lost "for love of brazilwood". Damião de Góis, in 1566, wrote that the land was now "erroneously" called Brazil because of its red wood.
Pero de Magalhães Gândavo went further, titling his 1576 history of the colony as a history of "Santa Cruz, vulgarly called Brazil". He explained that the wood was called brazil "for being red, akin to embers", and then used the religious name throughout the book. None of this revived the religious name in everyday speech; as Barros himself admitted, Brazil had already stuck in the mouth of the people.
Brasileiro, a job title that became a nationality
The tree is also hidden in what Brazilians call themselves. Portuguese usually forms demonyms with -ano, so by the normal rule a person from Brazil would be a brasiliano. The suffix -eiro, by contrast, marks occupations, as -er does in English "baker". A brasileiro was originally a brazilwood cutter, and in Loronha's time that work was done mostly by Tupi people on the coast. The job title was later extended to every inhabitant of the country, so brasileiro is the only Portuguese demonym built on an occupation.
The name also replaced older Indigenous ones. Tradition holds that the Tupi called the coast Pindorama, "Land of the Palms", though linguists point out that a correct Tupi form would be Pindoretama or Pindotetama, so the familiar version may be a later corruption. The interior, then held mostly by Tapuya peoples, was Tapuiretama, "Land of the Enemy".
Hy-Brasil, the phantom island west of Ireland
One complication is that "Brasil" appeared on maps more than a century before Cabral sailed. Portolan charts placed an island called Bracile or Brasil west of Ireland, starting with Angelino Dulcert's chart of about 1325 and continuing through the Catalan Atlas of about 1375. Andrea Bianco's Venetian map of 1436 moved an Insula de Brasil into a group of mid-Atlantic islands later identified with Terceira in the Azores, where a volcanic mount above Angra do Heroísmo is still called Monte Brasil. Irish legend described Hy-Brasil, in Irish Uí Bhreasail, as an island hidden by mist except one day in every seven years.
The link between the two is debated. The Italian geographer Paolo Revelli argued in 1937 that the island name also came from the brazil dye, perhaps marking places where Genoese sailors could find dyestuff. Irish tradition instead derives it from the Uí Breasail, a minor Gaelic clan of north-eastern Ireland, or from Old Irish í, "island", and bres, "mighty". Whichever is right, the country took its name directly from the dyewood trade of the 1500s and not from the legendary island.
Brazilwood today: an endangered national tree
The tree that named a country of about 8.5 million km² is now hard to find in the wild. Excessive harvesting caused a steep fall in the number of trees in the 18th century and the collapse of the trade itself. The species is now nearly extinct across most of its original range, is listed as endangered by the IUCN, and appears on Brazil's official list of threatened flora. When the Portuguese arrived, the Atlantic Forest covered an estimated 1 to 1.5 million km², making it then the second-largest rainforest on the planet after the Amazon, and more than 85% of that area has since been cleared, as our guide to Brazil's Atlantic Forest describes.
Brazilwood is now the national tree of Brazil, and its main use is musical. Dense, springy Pernambuco wood is regarded as the best material for violin, viola and cello bows, which made bowmakers its last big market. At its 2024 meeting, CITES required existing stocks to be registered and finished bows to be marked and traceable, and in November 2025 it told suppliers and users to tighten that tracing. Bowmakers formed the International Pernambuco Conservation Initiative to replant the tree, and the shortage has helped carbon-fibre bows take market share. Many saplings have been planted outside the natural range, often with poor results, and specimens now grow in parks and botanical gardens, such as the one at the Parque das Águas in São Lourenço, Minas Gerais, shown at the top of this article.
The name has outlasted the forest it described. Brasília, the capital since 1960, carries the dyewood in its name, and so does every passport-holding brasileiro. For how the country's mountains, rivers and biomes fit together beyond that coastal strip, see our overview of Brazil's geography.