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The earliest known use of the name "America" dates to 1505, when German poet Matthias Ringmann used it in a poem about the New World. [2] The word is a Latinized form of the first name of Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci, who first proposed that the West Indies discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1492 were part of a previously unknown landmass, rather than the eastern limit of Asia.
The United States of America is a federal republic [1] consisting of 50 states, a federal district (Washington, D.C., the capital city of the United States), five major territories, and various minor islands. [2] [3] Both the states and the United States as a whole are each sovereign jurisdictions. [4]
The first documented use of the phrase "United States of America" is a letter from January 2, 1776. Stephen Moylan, a Continental Army aide to General George Washington, wrote to Joseph Reed, Washington's aide-de-camp, seeking to go "with full and ample powers from the United States of America to Spain" to seek assistance in the Revolutionary War effort.
However, without a clarifying context, singular America in English commonly refers to the United States of America. [2] Historically, in the English-speaking world, the term America could refer to a single continent until the 1950s (as in Van Loon's Geography of 1937): According to historians Kären Wigen and Martin W. Lewis, [3]
Map showing the source languages/language families of state names. The fifty U.S. states, the District of Columbia, the five inhabited U.S. territories, and the U.S. Minor Outlying Islands have taken their names from a wide variety of languages. The names of 24 states derive from indigenous languages of the Americas and one from Hawaiian.
The president of the United States is the head of state and head of government of the United States, [1] indirectly elected to a four-year term via the Electoral College. [2] Under the U.S. Constitution, the officeholder leads the executive branch of the federal government and is the commander-in-chief of the United States Armed Forces. [3]
U.S. Census Bureau regions and divisions. Since 1950, the United States Census Bureau defines four statistical regions, with nine divisions. [1] [2] The Census Bureau region definition is "widely used... for data collection and analysis", [3] and is the most commonly used classification system.
The full name of the republic is the "United States of America". No other name appears in the Constitution, and this is the name that appears on money, in treaties, and in legal cases to which the nation is a party. The terms "Government of the United States of America" or "United States Government" are often used in official documents to ...