Greenland is called Greenland because Erik the Red, a Norse settler exiled from Iceland, named it Grœnland, Old Norse for "green land", in the 980s. The Saga of Erik the Red says he chose the name because people would be more willing to go there if the land had a favourable name. The name was not pure invention: the fjords of the south-west, where Erik settled, are green with grass in summer, even though the ice sheet covers about 81% of the island. In Greenlandic the island has a different name altogether, Kalaallit Nunaat, "land of the Kalaallit".
Grœnland belongs to a family of names. The Norse who sailed west from Norway in the 9th and 10th centuries often named a new coast with a single descriptive word plus land, and the names they left on Greenland's fjords, and on the coasts beyond it, show how they read the landscape. Later Danish, English and Greenlandic names were added on top. Read together, they explain why the island's name is less of a trick than it is often made out to be.
Snæland, Ísland, Grœnland: the Norse "land" names of the North Atlantic
The pattern began in Iceland. According to the Landnámabók, the first Norseman to reach Iceland, Naddodd, called it Snæland, "snow land", and Hrafna-Flóki Vilgerðarson later named it Ísland after seeing a fjord full of drift ice. Both names describe what a sailor saw on arrival. Greenland was first sighted in the same way: Gunnbjörn Ulfsson, blown off course between Norway and Iceland at some point between about 876 and 932, saw islands to the west that became known as Gunnbjörn's skerries, but he did not land.
Erik Thorvaldsson, called Erik the Red, was born in Rogaland in Norway around 950 and grew up in north-western Iceland after his father was banished for manslaughter. Around 982 Erik was himself outlawed from Iceland for three years after a series of killings. He spent the exile exploring the coast west of Iceland, and when he returned he chose the name Grœnland for the country he had found. In 986 a fleet of 14 boats led by Erik took settlers from Iceland and Norway to the south-west coast. Like Snæland and Ísland, the name describes the land, but it describes the best of it, and the saga openly records the motive.
The descriptive name was not wholly misleading at the time. Ice-core and shell evidence suggests that between about 800 and 1300 the fjords of southern Greenland were several degrees warmer than usual for the North Atlantic, with trees and grasses growing and livestock being farmed; barley was grown as far north as the 70th parallel. The Norse who came found pasture where they settled, and Iceland's own shortage of good land was one reason they went.
Eystribyggð, Vestribyggð and Brattahlíð: names on Erik's green coast
The settlers named their two main districts by direction, though neither name is exact. The Eastern Settlement, Eystribyggð, lay more to the south than the east, at the heads of long fjords near the southern tip such as Eiriksfjord (now Tunulliarfik), Einarsfjord (Igaliku) and Sermilik Fjord. At its peak it held about 4,000 people, and about 500 groups of Norse farm ruins and 16 church ruins have been found there, at sites including Brattahlíð, Garðar, Hvalsey and Herjolfsnes. The Western Settlement, Vestribyggð, lay further north, at the head of the deep Nuup Kangerlua fjord inland from modern Nuuk, with perhaps 1,000 people and nearly 95 farms.
The farm names are as plain as the island's. Erik's own estate, Brattahlíð, means "the steep slope"; it stood about 96 km from the open sea at the head of Tunulliarfik Fjord, sheltered from ocean storms, where the village of Qassiarsuk stands today. Garðar, in the same district, became the seat of Greenland's bishop. Traces of three churches have been found at Brattahlíð; the oldest, Thjodhild's church, named after Erik's wife Þjódhild, was uncovered in 1961 when the community began building a school, and is likely the first church in the Americas. Its tiny interior measured about 2 m by 3.5 m, and the churchyard around it held the remains of 144 people. Erik himself died there around 1003 during a winter epidemic. In 2017 Brattahlíð and other sites were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as Kujataa Greenland: Norse and Inuit Farming at the Edge of the Ice Cap.
The colony lasted about four centuries, and from 1261 the Norse Greenlanders were subjects of the Kingdom of Norway, which later passed with them into the Kalmar Union of 1397. Ivar Bardarson, a Norwegian cleric sent to Garðar in 1341, found only empty farms when he visited the Western Settlement, and the last written record from the Eastern Settlement is of a wedding at Hvalsey in 1408. The Little Ice Age, which shortened growing seasons, coincides with the decline, and bone analysis shows the settlers' diet shifting from about 80% farm produce at first to 50 to 80% seafood by the 14th century. The green land of the name had become harder to live from. Some of the best grazing in the colony was in the Vatnahverfi district south-east of Einarsfjord, which holds about 10% of all known farm sites in the Eastern Settlement. The Norse names faded with their speakers, and most of these places are known today by Greenlandic names.
Helluland, Markland and Vinland: the names Leif Erikson gave to the west
Erik's son Leif Erikson carried the naming habit further. The Saga of the Greenlanders says that in 1002 or 1003 he followed a route first described by Bjarni Herjólfsson and named three lands on North America's Atlantic shore. The first, covered with flat stones, he called Helluland, "land of flat rocks". The next, flat and wooded with white sandy beaches, became Markland, "forest land", usually placed on the Labrador coast; Greenlanders seem to have sailed there later for timber, because Greenland had only one small forest. The third was Vínland, "Vinland the Good".
These names work exactly like Grœnland: one striking feature, then "land". Vinland shows how hard such names can be to interpret. It has usually been read as "wine land", but some scholars prefer the Old Norse homophone vin, "pasture" or "meadow". The name was written down as early as about 1075 by Adam of Bremen, who spelled it Winland. In 1960 Helge Ingstad and Anne Stine Ingstad found the remains of Norse buildings at L'Anse aux Meadows, on the northern tip of Newfoundland, proving that the Norse had reached mainland North America.
Gunnbjørn Fjeld, Godthåb and Thule: names added by later explorers
When Denmark-Norway returned to Greenland, a new layer of names arrived. In 1721 the missionary Hans Egede founded the Hope Colony on Kangeq Island off the west coast, and in 1728 the royal governor Claus Paarss moved it to the mainland, to the Inuit settlement of Nûk, where the new colony was named Godthaab, "good hope". The word nuuk means "cape" in Greenlandic and is common in place names. Godthaab became the seat of government for South Greenland and, from 1940, for the whole colony. On 1 May 1979 the new Greenland Home Rule government renamed the city Nuuk.
Other modern names recall the Norse story. The island's highest mountain, Gunnbjørn Fjeld, about 3,700 m in the Watkins Range on the east coast, honours Gunnbjörn Ulfsson; it was first climbed on 16 August 1935. In the far north-west the explorer Knud Rasmussen founded a trading post in 1910 and named it Thule, after the classical ultima Thule, at a place the Inuit called Uummannaq, "heart-shaped". The US air base built nearby in 1951 carried the Thule name until it was renamed Pituffik Space Base in 2023, after the Greenlandic name for the site, meaning "quay" or "dock". The people moved from Old Thule in 1953 were resettled at a new village now called Qaanaaq. Rasmussen's choice also named a whole culture: after the whaling captain George Comer found a midden at the site in 1916, its excavation revealed a proto-Inuit village, and archaeologists came to call the ancestors of today's Greenlanders the Thule people.
Kalaallit Nunaat: the name Greenlanders use
The Greenlandic name follows a different logic. Kalaallit Nunaat means "land of the Kalaallit", the principal group of Greenlandic Inuit, who live mainly in the west; northern Greenlanders call themselves Inughuit and eastern Greenlanders Tunumiit. The word Kalaallit was probably adapted from the Norse term Skræling, so even this name carries a trace of the Norse. Their ancestors, the Thule people, migrated east from Alaska and reached Greenland around 1300, centuries after Erik's settlers. Most of Greenland's 56,583 people (2022) are Inuit, and the capital alone had 20,113 residents in January 2025.
The Greenlandic word nunaat covers land only; it does not include water or ice. That makes the two names oddly close in spirit. Erik named the green fringe he could farm, and Kalaallit Nunaat names the land where people live, the coastal strip outside the 1,755,637 km² ice sheet described in our guide to the Greenland ice sheet. The colder name went to the greener island, a contrast traced in why Iceland is called Iceland, and the shift from Godthåb to Nuuk is part of the longer story of Nuuk, Greenland's capital.