Where did America get its name from?

The name derived from map annotations credited to Italian explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci of Florence (1454-1512) who was among the first to postulate that the New World was a separate landmass from Asia. The Latin form of his first name is Americus.

Many map makers in Europe had considered that the Atlantic Ocean west of Europe might be the same vast body of water as the Pacific Ocean east of China and Japan. Only the Vikings had made poorly-documented journeys to North America south of Greenland. Columbus and others had greatly underestimated the westward distance from Europe to Asia, which took Ferdinand Magellan's expedition 18 months to travel (1519-1521).