Columbia (personification)

"Columbia" (/kəˈlʌmbiə/; kə-LUM-bee-ə) is a historical and poetic name used for the United States of America and also as one of the names of its female personification. It has given rise to the names of many persons, places, objects, institutions, and companies; e.g., Columbia University, the District of Columbia (the national capital), and the ship Columbia Rediviva, which would give its name to the Columbia River. Images of the Statue of Liberty largely displaced Columbia as the female symbol of the U.S. by around 1920.

Columbia is a New Latin toponym, in use since the 1730s for the Thirteen Colonies. It originated from the name of Christopher Columbus and from the ending -ia, common in Latin names of countries (paralleling Britannia, Gallia etc.).

Massachusetts Chief Justice Samuel Sewall used the name Columbina (not Columbia) for the New World in 1697. The name Columbia for "America" first appeared in 1738 in the weekly publication of the debates of the British Parliament in Edward Cave's The Gentleman's Magazine. Publication of Parliamentary debates was technically illegal, so the debates were issued under the thin disguise of Reports of the Debates of the Senate of Lilliput, and fictitious names were used for most individuals and placenames found in the record. Most of these were transparent anagrams or similar distortions of the real names; some few were taken directly from Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels; and a few others were classical or neoclassical in style. Such were Ierne for Ireland, Iberia for Spain, Noveborac for New York (from Eboracum, the Roman name for York), and Columbia for America—at the time used in the sense of "European colonies in the New World".

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