Demonyms for the United States

People from the United States of America are known as and refer to themselves as Americans, a term deriving from the United States of America, the country's official name. In English, it came to refer to inhabitants of British America, and then the United States. There is some linguistic ambiguity over this use because the word can also refer to people from the Americas in general. Some languages, including French, Japanese, and Russian, use cognates of American to refer to people from the United States. Others, particularly Spanish and Portuguese, primarily use terms derived from United States or North America. There are various other local and colloquial names for Americans. The name America is the feminine form of Americus, the Latin first name of the Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci.

Development of the term American

Amerigo Vespucci first demonstrated that Brazil and the West Indies did not represent Asia's eastern outskirts as conjectured by Christopher Columbus, but instead constituted an entirely separate landmass hitherto unknown to the peoples of the Old World. Martin Waldseemüller coined the term America (in honor of Vespucci) in a 1507 world map.

First uses of the adjective American referred to the indigenous peoples of the Americas and subsequently to European settlers of the Americas and their descendants.