Canada is called Canada after kanata, a St. Lawrence Iroquoian (Laurentian) word meaning "village" or "settlement", which the people of Stadacona, near present-day Quebec City, used in 1535 to direct the French explorer Jacques Cartier to their village. Cartier wrote it down as "Canada" and extended it to the whole area under the Stadacona chief Donnacona and to the St. Lawrence River, and by 1545 European books and maps were using it for that stretch of the river valley. This derivation is now generally accepted; the rival "cá nada" ("nothing here") story has no documentary support. The word did not stay alone, either. It has a family of relatives, from cognates in living Iroquoian languages to colonial names like Upper Canada and a 1970s Ottawa suburb, and each one adds to the story.
Kanata and its Iroquoian cousins: nekantaa, ganataje, kanataye
The first branch of the family is linguistic. Laurentian, the language of the St. Lawrence Iroquoians, died out in the late 16th century along with its speakers, so kanata (pronounced roughly [kana:taʔ]) survives mainly through Cartier's word lists. Its close relatives are still spoken south and west of the river. The word for "town" is nekantaa in Mohawk, ganataje in Onondaga and kanataye in Seneca. Translators have also rendered the root as "land", "town", "cluster of dwellings" and "collection of huts", but the core sense is a place where people live together.
Those cognates explain an old mistake in older reference books. Until archaeologists showed that the St. Lawrence Iroquoians were a separate people from the Mohawk, most sources said that "Canada" came from Mohawk. The linguist Marianne Mithun concluded from Cartier's vocabularies that Laurentian was Iroquoian and had close contact with the Huron and Iroquois. A later comparison by Charles Julian found 47 cognates shared with Huron, Mohawk and Onondaga, but enough distinct features to place Laurentian in its own subgroup of Northern Iroquoian. The country's name therefore comes from a language that no one has spoken for more than four centuries, and the languages sharing most vocabulary with it are Huron, Mohawk and Onondaga.
A popular story says Cartier misunderstood a common noun as a place name. His own account does not support it. In the Bref récit, his narrative of the 1535 to 1536 voyage, he writes plainly that "they call a town Canada". He knew what the word meant and chose to use it as a name, rather than mishearing it.
Stadacona and Hochelaga, the two villages Cartier labelled Canada in 1535
The second branch is the set of Iroquoian place names Cartier recorded alongside kanata. On his first voyage, in July 1534 near Gaspé Bay, he took two young men, Domagaya and Taignoagny, back to France; they are usually identified as sons of Donnacona, the chief of Stadacona, though Cartier's own report does not say so directly. They returned with him in 1535, and they are the people who used the word "kanata" for their home. Stadacona stood near the meeting of the St. Lawrence and the Saint-Charles River, probably in what is now the Vieux-Limoilou district of Quebec City, but no archaeological trace of it has been found.
Upriver lay Hochelaga, a fortified village on or near Mount Royal on Montreal Island, which Cartier reached by boat on 2 October 1535 and visited the next day. Linguists read its name as a French borrowing of either osekare, "beaver path", or osheaga, "big rapids", a likely reference to the Lachine Rapids. Cartier saw about a dozen Laurentian villages between Stadacona and Hochelaga, some housing up to 2,000 people. Each was a kanata in the ordinary sense, though only one gave its word to the country.
These names have survived far less well than the word Canada. When Samuel de Champlain arrived in 1608, about 75 years later, he found no trace of the people Cartier had met. Archaeological evidence points most strongly to wars with neighbouring Iroquoian nations, especially the Mohawk, though epidemics and migration towards the Great Lakes have also been proposed. The Laurentian words left on today's map are few. Hochelaga lives on in the Montreal borough of Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, and as "Osheaga" in the name of a music festival. The chief's name survives in the town of Donnacona, Quebec. A stone marker placed in 1925 beside McGill University marks the presumed site of Hochelaga and is a National Historic Site of Canada.
From rivière de Canada to the Province of Canada, 1535 to 1867
The third branch is the long line of colonial names built on Cartier's word. On the 1535 voyage he already called the St. Lawrence the rivière de Canada. Through the 17th century, "Canada" was the name of the colony of New France that lay along the river, and the two terms were often used interchangeably. Quebec City, founded by Champlain on 3 July 1608 close to the abandoned site of Stadacona, sat at its centre, so the name ended up only a few kilometres from where it had first been recorded.
After Britain took New France in 1763, the colony was renamed the Province of Quebec, and for a time the word fell out of official use. It returned on 26 December 1791, when the Constitutional Act split the province into Upper Canada and Lower Canada. This was the first official British use of the name, and the pair were known together as "the Canadas". The Act of Union joined them in 1841 as the Province of Canada, with Canada West and Canada East as its halves. Some reports from the 1840s suggest the word was then commonly pronounced "Kaugh-na-daugh".
The demonym followed its own path. "Canadien" first referred only to Indigenous peoples of the territory, a usage traced to 1664. By 1746 it covered the French settlers of New France, and by 1792 the English-speaking settlers of Upper Canada as well. During the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, many French speakers in Quebec began to call themselves Québécois instead. That left "Canadien" and "Canadian" as national rather than ethnic labels.
At the London Conference in February 1867, a delegate from either Nova Scotia or New Brunswick proposed "Canada" as the name of the new federation, and the others accepted it unanimously with little debate. Outside the conference, others proposed alternatives: Cabotia, after John Cabot; Laurentia; Hochelaga; Albionoria; Victorialand; Tupona, short for "The United Provinces of North America"; Efisga, an acronym of English, French, Irish, Scottish, German and American; and Borealia, "northern land", the counterpart of the name discussed in why Australia is called Australia. None got close. Dominion Day, marking Confederation on 1 July 1867, was renamed Canada Day in 1982, the same year the Canada Act brought the constitution fully under Canadian control.
Kébec and Ontarí:io, the neighbouring Indigenous names
The fourth branch is a set of neighbouring names rather than direct relatives. Several Canadian provinces and cities also took their names from Indigenous words for landscape features, and they show how naturally kanata fitted in. Quebec comes from the Algonquin Kébec, "where the river narrows", because the St. Lawrence pinches in beside the promontory of Cap Diamant. Champlain adopted that name in 1608. The source language is Algonquian, a separate language family from Iroquoian, so Quebec and Canada are neighbours rather than cognates.
Ontario is a closer case. The name is thought to come either from Huron (Wyandot) Ontarí:io, "great lake", or from an Iroquoian skanadario, "beautiful" or "sparkling water". It was first recorded in 1641 for land on the north shore of the easternmost Great Lake and became the province's official name at Confederation in 1867. When Canada West was renamed Ontario and Canada East was renamed Quebec in 1867, the federation's name and its two most populous provinces' names all came from Indigenous words recorded along the same river system.
Kanata, Ontario, where the root was recycled in 1978
The newest member of the family deliberately goes back to the original spelling. Kanata is a community about 22 km (14 mi) west of downtown Ottawa. It was largely planned from the 1960s by developer Bill Teron on more than 1,200 hectares (3,000 acres) of rural land in March Township. When Ontario incorporated it as a city in 1978, residents chose the name in a referendum, picking "Kanata" over "Hazeldean", "March" and "Kairnwood". The former city had 98,938 people in 2021, and Teron set aside land for a technology park whose first tenants included Atomic Energy Canada, Northern Electric and Mitel. Kanata was merged into the City of Ottawa in 2001.
Cá nada, cañada and the false relatives
The last branch is made up of etymologies that look related but are not. The most widespread is the claim that Spanish or Portuguese sailors found no gold and wrote cá nada or aquí nada, "nothing here", on their maps. No Spanish or Portuguese map of the coast made before Cartier's voyage shows the name Canada. The only Portuguese name attested for Newfoundland is Terra Nova do Bacalhau, after its cod. No evidence has been found of any Iberian contact with the St. Lawrence Iroquoians. The philologist Marshall Elliott preferred Spanish cañada, "glen", but Cartier never mentions a Spanish name either. The Franciscan André Thevet's segnada Canada uses words that do not exist in Spanish.
Fringe and joke theories fill out the list, including a link to the Kannada people of India, a Seneca phrase kha:na:ta, "follow me closely", and a supposed demand for a "can a day" of spruce beer, which fails because the settlers spoke French. None has any scholarly support. The village word Cartier heard at Stadacona remains the one origin backed by a written record. Its river is still the country's main corridor, as our guide to the St. Lawrence River shows, and its namesake sits 22 km west of downtown Ottawa, Canada's capital.