Where Did Europe’s Countries—and the United Kingdom—Get Their Names?

Where Did Europe’s Countries—and the United Kingdom—Get Their Names? The typical student traveling on a Eurail pass will stop in such lands as Österreich, Italia, Česko and Schweiz — also known as Suisse, Svizzera, and Svizra. If that student happens to hail from the English-speaking world, the names Austria, Italy, the Czech Republic (the recent movement for Czechia notwithstanding), and Switzerland will sound more familiar. But the question inevitably comes to mind while riding between one historically and culturally rich capital to another: where did all these countries get their names in English? How on Earth, for example, did Deutschland, known in certain other European languages as Allemagne, Alemania, or Alemanha, get to be called Germany? Language YouTuber RobWords has an explanation. “To the Romans, it was the land of the Germani, their name for the weird people speaking gibberish languages to the east of the River Rhine,” he says in the v