America was named after Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian explorer and navigator from Florence. Vespucci was among the first to propose that the lands discovered by Christopher Columbus were part of a new continent, separate from Asia. This revolutionary idea led German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller to name the new continent "America" on his 1507 world map, using a Latinized version of Amerigo's first name to honor him
. Waldseemüller's map was the first to clearly depict the Western Hemisphere as a separate landmass and used the name "America" for what is now South America. The name eventually came to be applied to both North and South America. Although there are other theories about the name's origin—such as it being named after the Amerrisque mountains in Nicaragua or an English merchant named Richard Amerike—the Vespucci explanation is the most widely accepted and historically documented
. The choice of using Amerigo's first name rather than his last name, Vespucci, was likely influenced by the desire to create a name parallel to "Europe" (named after the mythological Europa) and to use a Latinized form that would be more universally appealing across different European languages
