America is named after Amerigo Vespucci (Americus Vespuccius in Latin), who wasn’t the first to make landfall in the New World — that was Columbus— but he did take part in important voyages of discovery along the coast of South America. His reports to his sponsors were circulated (or bootlegged or plagiarized or something) widely in Europe. He and others realized that the land masses they were exploring were not part of Asia but were rather a previously “undiscovered country,” as Shakespeare put it. A German mapmaker named Martin Waldseemuller used Amerigo’s accounts in depicting the new lands on a world map, shown below, and proposed giving his name to what is now South America. That continent you see on the far right is labeled “America.” The name stuck and was later extended to North America as well.

Columbus didn’t do too badly, either, with the nation of Colombia and the capital district of the United States named for him.