Say it out loud. The United States of America. It rolls off the tongue so naturally, so completely, that it is almost impossible to imagine calling this country anything else. The name feels permanent. Inevitable. Like it was always going to be exactly this.
It wasn’t.
The naming of a new nation is not a simple thing. It is a political act, a philosophical statement, and a branding decision all rolled into one. And in the chaotic, brilliant, deeply contentious years when this country was being built from scratch, the question of what to call it was very much an open one.
The United States of America almost had a different name. Several different names, actually. And the story of how the country ended up with the name it has — and what it almost became instead — reveals something fascinating about who the founders were, what they valued, and what kind of country they were trying to build.
The Problem With Naming a Revolution
When the thirteen colonies declared independence from Britain on July 4, 1776, they had a declaration. They had a cause. What they did not yet have was a clear, agreed-upon identity.
The colonies had always been defined by their relationship to Britain — they were British colonies, British subjects, part of the British Empire. Strip that relationship away and the question of what remained was genuinely complicated. Were they thirteen separate nations that happened to be fighting together? Were they a single new country? Were they something in between that the world had never quite seen before?
The founders argued about this constantly. The debates were fierce, personal, and sometimes petty in the way that only arguments between brilliant people who are also exhausted and terrified tend to be.
And running underneath all of those debates was a simpler, more immediate question. What do we call ourselves?
Columbia
The most popular alternative name for the United States — the one that came closest to actually winning — was Columbia.
The name was everywhere in the revolutionary era. Poets used it. Newspapers used it. Pamphlets used it. It appeared in songs and speeches and public addresses as a shorthand for the new American nation and the ideals it represented. The name derived from Christopher Columbus, the explorer whose 1492 voyage had opened the Americas to European knowledge, and it carried a sense of New World identity that felt distinct from anything European.
Phillis Wheatley, the remarkable poet who was also one of the first published African American writers in history, addressed a famous 1775 poem to George Washington and referred to America as Columbia throughout. Washington himself was moved by the poem and invited Wheatley to meet with him.
The name Columbia was so widely used and so genuinely popular that it remained in serious consideration well into the constitutional period. Had a few decisions gone differently — had the Constitutional Convention landed on it, had a key vote swung another way — the United States of America might today be called the Republic of Columbia, or the Columbian Republic, or simply Columbia.
The echoes of that near miss are everywhere once you start looking. Washington DC was originally called the Territory of Columbia. The District of Columbia still carries that name today. British Columbia in Canada. The Space Shuttle Columbia. Columbia University. Columbia Records. The name never went away — it just never became the official one.
Freedonia
Not every proposed name had the gravitas of Columbia.
Freedonia was suggested during the revolutionary period as a name that captured the core ideal the new nation was founded upon — freedom. The logic was straightforward. If this country was going to stand for anything, it was going to stand for liberty and freedom, so why not simply name it after that principle?
The name never gained serious traction among the founders, most of whom found it a little too on the nose — more like a slogan than a name. It later became famous for entirely different reasons when the Marx Brothers used it as the name of the fictional country in their 1933 political satire Duck Soup, which effectively buried any lingering chance the name had of being taken seriously by history.
But the impulse behind it was real. Several founders genuinely believed the name of the country should reflect its founding values as directly and explicitly as possible.
Appalachia
The Appalachian Mountains run the length of the eastern seaboard, from Alabama all the way up through New England and into Canada. They were, in the colonial and revolutionary era, one of the most dominant geographical features of the known American landscape — the great natural wall that separated the settled eastern seaboard from the vast, largely unexplored interior of the continent.
Naming the new nation Appalachia would have grounded its identity in the land itself — in the physical reality of North America rather than in European exploration or abstract political ideals. Several voices in the founding era argued for names derived from the geography of the continent, and Appalachia was among the most discussed.
The argument had a certain poetry to it. This was a nation breaking from Europe, rejecting the old world and its hierarchies and its history. What better way to declare that break than to name the country after something purely, unmistakably American — a mountain range that had existed long before any European set foot on the continent?
The counter argument was equally compelling. The Appalachian Mountains were impressive but they were also just one part of a vast continent. Naming the entire nation after one regional geographical feature seemed limiting — especially for a country whose founders already imagined it eventually stretching far beyond those mountains.
Alleghania
A variation on the geographical naming argument produced another candidate — Alleghania, derived from the Allegheny Mountains and the broader Allegheny region of the mid-Atlantic.
Thomas Jefferson, who had strong opinions about almost everything, reportedly favored names derived from Native American languages and geography. He believed that the new nation should draw its identity from the land and from the peoples who had inhabited it long before European arrival, rather than from European explorers or European political concepts.
Jefferson’s instinct here was more enlightened than most of his contemporaries managed to be on questions relating to Native Americans, even if his actual policies toward Native peoples were far more complicated and troubling. The idea that American identity should be rooted in American soil and American names rather than imported European ones was genuinely radical for its time.
Alleghania never moved beyond the discussion stage, but it represented a real philosophical position about what kind of country this was supposed to be.
The Name That Almost Wasn’t
Here is the part of the story that most people find genuinely surprising.
The phrase “United States of America” appeared in the Declaration of Independence in 1776, but using a phrase in a document is not the same as officially adopting it as a national name. The Continental Congress used various formulations in different documents — “the United Colonies,” “the United States,” “these United States,” and “the United States of America” all appeared in official documents during the revolutionary period, sometimes interchangeably.
The name was never formally voted on. It was never officially adopted through a specific legislative act the way a flag design or a national motto was debated and decided. It emerged organically through usage — appearing in the Declaration, appearing in the Articles of Confederation, appearing in the Constitution — until it had been used often enough in enough important documents that it simply became the name by default.
This means that in a very real sense, the United States of America was named the way most things in history are actually decided — not through a grand deliberate choice, but through a gradual accumulation of small decisions, habits, and assumptions that eventually hardened into fact.
What the Name Actually Means
It is worth pausing to appreciate just how unusual the name “United States of America” actually is as a name for a country.
Most countries are named after a people, a place, a historical figure, or a founding myth. France is named for the Franks. England is named for the Angles. Mexico derives from the Mexica people. Even the name America itself comes from the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci, whose accounts of the New World led mapmakers to label the continents after him.
But the United States of America is not named after a people or a place or a person. It is named after a political arrangement. The United States. A union of states. It is a descriptive phrase masquerading as a proper noun — a name that tells you the structure of the government rather than the identity of the people.
This has always been both the strength and the tension of the American name. It leaves the question of who Americans actually are deliberately open. The name does not define the people by ethnicity or religion or geography. It defines them by their relationship to a political structure — a union of states, voluntarily joined, theoretically able to be left.
That ambiguity has fueled American identity debates from the founding era to the present day. It is baked into the name itself.
The Nickname That Stuck
Alongside the official name, Americans very quickly developed an informal one.
America. Just America.
Technically, the entire Western Hemisphere is America — North America, South America, Central America. Brazilians are Americans. Canadians are Americans. Mexicans are Americans. The word describes a geography, not a nationality.
But sometime in the early years of the republic, citizens of the United States began calling themselves Americans and calling their country America as if the word belonged to them exclusively. The habit spread, stuck, and has never really been successfully challenged despite the entirely reasonable objections of everyone else in the hemisphere who has an equal geographical claim to the name.
It is a small act of national confidence that borders on arrogance, depending on your perspective. And it is very on brand for a country that named itself after its own political structure and then shortened that to just America as if the rest of the continents were a minor detail.
The Roads Not Taken
Imagine for a moment a world where the vote went differently. Where Columbia became the official name. Where the capital city was not Washington DC but something else entirely. Where citizens called themselves Columbians and their country the Republic of Columbia.
Would the country be different? In practical terms, probably not much. Names do not change the underlying reality of geography, economics, and politics. The same land, the same people, the same history would have unfolded regardless of what the nation was called.
But names matter in ways that are hard to quantify. They shape identity. They carry connotations. They tell a story about what a country thinks it is and where it thinks it came from.
Columbia would have told a story about New World identity and the break from Europe. Appalachia or Alleghania would have told a story about rootedness in the American land. Freedonia would have told a story about ideology and values.
The United States of America tells a story about structure and union — about the radical experiment of asking separate, sovereign states to voluntarily bind themselves together under a shared government while retaining their individual identities.
That turned out to be exactly the right story to tell. Because that tension — between the united and the states, between the national and the local, between the one and the many — has been the central drama of American history from the founding era to today.
A Name That Had to Be Earned
The United States of America almost had a different name. Columbia came close. Appalachia had its advocates. Jefferson dreamed of something rooted in Native American language and geography. Freedonia captured an impulse if not a serious proposal.
But the name that emerged from that chaotic, brilliant, contentious founding period was one that described not what the country was, but what it was trying to be. A union. A collection of different places and different people choosing to act as one while remaining many.
Whether the country has ever fully lived up to that name is a question every generation of Americans has had to answer for itself.
The name did not guarantee the union. It did not prevent a civil war or resolve the contradictions built into the founding. It did not make the experiment work.
But it named the experiment honestly. And that, for a country built on the radical idea that people could govern themselves, was a reasonable place to start.
