Spain is called Spain because the name descends, through Spanish España and Old French Espaigne, from Hispania, the Latin name the Romans used for the whole Iberian Peninsula. The word is on record by about 200 BC in the poet Quintus Ennius, and in 197 BC Rome gave it to its first two provinces there. Where Hispania itself came from is unknown. The most quoted theory traces it to a Phoenician name, i-shphan-im, possibly meaning "land of rabbits" or "land of hyraxes", but scholars treat that and every rival explanation as unproven. What can be dated with confidence is the long run of official names the territory has carried since, from Roman provinces to today's Kingdom of Spain.
This article follows those names in order. The Roman word stayed remarkably stable for over two thousand years; what changed was the political unit it was attached to, from a peninsula of several provinces and kingdoms to a single state whose borders are smaller than ancient Hispania's.
Before 197 BC: i-shphan-im and the Phoenician coast
Phoenician sailors made their first contacts with Iberia's Mediterranean coast in the 10th century BC. Settlers from Tyre founded Gadir, modern Cádiz; tradition dates it to 1104 BC, although nothing found there so far is older than the 9th century BC, when Tyre also founded Malaka, modern Málaga. The Phoenicians are recorded as calling the region i-shphan-im. Proposed translations include "land of rabbits or hyraxes", "land of metals", "northern island" and "lowland". The rabbit reading is popular because the Greek geographer Strabo called Iberia the "land of the rabbits", and Roman coins struck there from the reign of Hadrian show a female figure with a rabbit at her feet.
Other explanations followed. Isidore of Seville, writing in the 7th century, thought the name was Iberian and derived it from Hispalis, the pre-Roman name for Seville; the etymologist Eric Partridge revived this, suggesting a lost root *Hispa. Ancient and medieval texts also invented an eponymous hero, Hispan, first mentioned by the Roman historian Pompeius Trogus in the 1st century BC. In the 18th and 19th centuries Jesuit scholars such as Larramendi and José Francisco de Isla linked the name to the Basque ezpain, "lip" or "edge". Roman writers sometimes used a different name altogether, Hesperia ultima, "the farthest western land". Modern scholarship regards the evidence for all of these as resemblances that are probably accidental, so the honest answer to where "Hispania" came from is that nobody knows.
197 BC: Hispania Citerior and Hispania Ulterior
Rome arrived during the Second Punic War, landing in 218 BC and defeating the Carthaginians at Ilipa, near Seville, in 206 BC. In 197 BC, four years after the war ended, the Republic organised its conquests into two provinces. Hispania Citerior, "Nearer Spain", ran along the east coast down to Cartago Nova (Cartagena) and covered roughly today's Catalonia and Valencia. Hispania Ulterior, "Further Spain", lay to the south, further from Rome. This is the earliest official use of the name as an administrative label, and the adjectives "nearer" and "further" show that it was coined from Rome's point of view. Several governors of Hispania Citerior led wars against the Celtiberians who lived to the west of the province. The conquest itself took nearly two centuries and was not complete until Augustus ended the Cantabrian Wars in 19 BC.
Late 1st century BC to AD 461: Tarraconensis, Baetica, Lusitania and the Diocese
Augustus reorganised the peninsula in the late 1st century BC. Hispania Citerior was replaced by the much larger Hispania Tarraconensis, named after its capital Tarraco (Tarragona); Hispania Ulterior became Hispania Baetica, after the Baetis river (the Guadalquivir); and a third province, Lusitania, was created in the west, with its capital at Emerita Augusta (Mérida). Each new name kept "Hispania" as the family label even as the provinces multiplied.
Diocletian's reforms, which divided an empire of 46 provinces into about 101 grouped into 12 dioceses, split Tarraconensis again, creating Carthaginensis and Gallaecia (the root of modern Galicia). From 298 the mainland provinces, with the North African province of Mauretania Tingitana and later the Balearic Islands as Hispania Balearica, were grouped into the Dioecesis Hispaniarum, the Diocese of the Spains, governed from Augusta Emerita (Mérida) by a vicarius. The plural matters: Latin writers spoke of Hispaniae, "the Spains", a habit that survived into royal titles centuries later. The diocese began to collapse after Vandals, Alans and Suebi crossed the Pyrenees in 409 and lasted until about 461.
552 to 1274: Spania, al-Andalus and the Estoria de España
After Rome, the name passed to new rulers. The Visigoths, who made Toledo their centre, kept using Hispania; Isidore of Seville opened his history of the Goths with the Laus Hispaniae, a hymn of praise to the land. In 552 the Eastern Roman emperor Justinian I carved out a coastal province in the south and the Balearics called Spania, already dropping the initial "Hi-"; it survived until 624.
From 711 most of the peninsula came under Umayyad rule and a new name appeared. Al-Andalus (الأندلس) is first attested on bilingual Latin and Arabic dinars minted in 716. It has traditionally been derived from the Vandals, though since the 1980s scholars have proposed a corruption of Atlantis (Joaquín Vallvé, 1986), a Gothic term *landahlauts (Heinz Halm, 1989) and a pre-Roman root (Georg Bossong, 2002). At its greatest extent al-Andalus covered most of the peninsula and Septimania in southern France; it shrank after the Christian capture of Toledo in 1085 and the fall of Córdoba in 1236 and Seville in 1248, until only the Emirate of Granada remained. The name lives on in the region of Andalusia.
The Christian kingdoms of the north held on to the Latin word. From 1077 Alfonso VI of León and Castile styled himself Imperator totius Hispaniae, "Emperor of All Spain", and the imperial title was at its height in formal use between 1086 and 1157, mainly by the kings of León and Castile. Between 1260 and 1274 Alfonso X of Castile had the Estoria de España written, believed to be the first long history in Old Castilian to use España and Españoles for the medieval peninsula and its people. The romance forms had arrived: Castilian España, Catalan Espanya and Old French Espaigne, recorded in a 1292 document naming one Gracien d'Espaigne.
1469 to 1640: from the Catholic Monarchs to the "King of Spain"
A single state took shape in stages. Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon married in 1469, and the dynastic union of their crowns in 1479 is often treated as the de facto unification of Spain. Granada fell in 1492, Navarre was added in 1512, and in 1580 Portugal, independent for more than 400 years, joined under the same monarch, so that for sixty years one king ruled the entire peninsula that the Romans had called Hispania. The kingdoms kept their own laws, so there was still no single legal title. On 5 December 1492 Christopher Columbus landed on a Caribbean island he named Española, without the article La; historians later popularised its Latin form, Hispaniola.
Habsburg rule from 1516 brought Charles I, who was also Holy Roman Emperor, and his son Philip II, King of Spain from 1556, struck coins reading HISP·REX and a 1583 medal calling him "King of Spain and the New World". The meaning of the word "Spain" still shifted. Until the 17th century it could cover the whole peninsula, Portugal included; after Portugal restored its independence in 1640, Spain gradually came to mean everything on the peninsula except Portugal, the sense it has today.
1812: the Constitution of the Spanish Monarchy at Cádiz
Constitutions finally put formal names in writing. On 19 March 1812 the Cortes of Cádiz ratified the Constitución Política de la Monarquía Española, Spain's first constitution, with delegates from Spanish America and the Philippines. Its title named the state as the Spanish Monarchy, and because it extended political representation to Spanish America and the Philippines, the nation it described was far larger than today's country. Ferdinand VII abolished it in 1814, and it returned briefly in 1820 to 1823 and 1836 to 1837.
1873 to 1978: two Republics, the Spanish State and the Kingdom of Spain
For the next century and a half the name of the state changed with its form of government. After King Amadeo abdicated, the Cortes proclaimed the República española on 11 February 1873; historians call it the First Republic, and it ended on 29 December 1874 when General Arsenio Martínez Campos proclaimed Alfonso XII king at Sagunto. A second República Española was proclaimed on 14 April 1931 after the deposition of Alfonso XIII and lasted until 1 April 1939. Franco's regime, recognised by the Nationalist junta on 1 October 1936, called the country the Estado Español, the Spanish State, until his death on 20 November 1975, even though a law of 1947 had declared Spain a kingdom with the throne left vacant.
The current arrangement dates from the constitution approved by referendum in 1978, sanctioned by King Juan Carlos I on 27 December and in force from 29 December. Its Article 1 states that Spain is established as a social and democratic state under the rule of law, with parliamentary monarchy as the political form of the Spanish State, and the official name is the Kingdom of Spain, Reino de España. The constitution also recognises the historic kingdoms and regions through the autonomous communities described in how many states Spain has, and the crown's role is set out in the government of Spain. The Roman label has outlasted every regime that used it, much as the old provincial name did in why Italy is called Italy.