- published: 21 Dec 2015
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Columbia ( /kəˈlʌmbiə/; kə-LUM-bee-ə) is a historical and poetic name used for the United States of America and is also the name of its female personification. It has inspired the names of many persons, places, objects, institutions, and companies --such as the District of Columbia, the site of the national capital, and Columbia University. Columbia was largely displaced as the female symbol of the U.S. by the Statue of Liberty after about 1920.
Columbia is a New Latin toponym, combining a stem Columb- based on the surname of the explorer Christopher Columbus and an ending -ia, common in Latin names of countries (e.g. Britannia "Britain", Gallia "Gaul"). The meaning is therefore "Land of Columbus."
The name Columbia for "America" (in the sense of "European colonies in the New World") first appeared in 1738 in the weekly publication of the debates of the British Parliament in Edward Cave's The Gentleman's Magazine. Publication of Parliamentary debates was technically illegal, so the debates were issued under the thin disguise of Reports of the Debates of the Senate of Lilliput, and fictitious names were used for most individuals and placenames found in the record. Most of these were transparent anagrams or similar distortions of the real names; some few were taken directly from Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels; and a few others were classical or neoclassical in style. Such were Ierne for Ireland, Iberia for Spain, Noveborac for New York (from Eboracum, the Roman name for York), and Columbia for America—at the time used in the sense of "European colonies in the New World".
Columbia may refer to:
A name is a word or term used for identification. Names can identify a class or category of things, or a single thing, either uniquely, or within a given context. A personal name identifies a specific unique and identifiable individual person, and may or may not include a middle name. The name of a specific entity is sometimes called a proper name (although that term has a philosophical meaning also) and is a proper noun. Other nouns are sometimes, more loosely, called names; an older term for them, now obsolete, is "general names".
The use of personal names is not unique to humans. Dolphins also use symbolic names, as has been shown by recent research. Individual dolphins have distinctive whistles, to which they will respond even when there is no other information to clarify which dolphin is being referred to.
Caution must be exercised when translating, for there are ways that one language may prefer one type of name over another. A feudal naming habit is used sometimes in other languages: the French sometimes refer to Aristotle as "le Stagirite" from one spelling of his place of birth, and English speakers often refer to Shakespeare as "The Bard", recognizing him as a paragon writer of the language. Finally, claims to preference or authority can be refuted: the British did not refer to Louis-Napoleon as Napoleon III during his rule.