We all know that America was named for Amerigo Vespucci. What does Amerigo mean in Italian? –Dave Curwin, Newton, Massachusetts
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There are a couple of theories on the name’s origin. One is that it’s a variant of Enrico, the Italian form of Henry, and derives from the Old German Haimirich (in later German Emmerich, in English Americus), from haimi (home) plus ric (power, ruler). Alternatively, it may come from the Old German Amalricus, from amal (work) plus ric. (Amalricus the foreman? Beats me.) Amerigo shows up in Italian writing from around the 12th century and may have been introduced by the Ostrogoths six centuries earlier (this from Dictionary of First Names, Hanks and Hodges, 1990).
The most interesting question of all is why America was named after a guy who was otherwise so obscure. For centuries it was argued that Amerigo Vespucci was a fraud who’d never traveled to the continent that bore his name and didn’t deserve to have either of his names applied to anything. But it’s now fairly well established that he made at least two voyages to the Americas, not as leader of an expedition but possibly as navigator, the first in 1499. He was not the first European of his era to set foot on the mainland, as was once thought, but probably was the first to realize that the land he helped explore was a separate continent and not merely the coast of Asia, as Columbus and others believed.
