mansplaining

“Classmates,” a 2006 sculpture by Paul Tadlock on the campus of the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, Texas. A bronze sculpture of a woman sitting on a bench, a book open in her lap, staring up at a man who has one foot on the bench, his arm resting on his knee, apparently speaking to her. The statue has been nicknamed the “mansplaining statue.”

“Classmates,” a 2006 sculpture by Paul Tadlock on the campus of the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, Texas. A bronze sculpture of a woman sitting on a bench, a book open in her lap, staring up at a man who has one foot on the bench, his arm resting on his knee, apparently speaking to her. The statue has been nicknamed the “mansplaining statue.”

27 July 2021

[Update: 25 August 2025, added context for the 21 May 2008 quotation]

Mansplaining is when a man patronizingly, condescendingly, and/or needlessly expounds on a topic to a woman, regardless of her expertise or qualifications in the subject. The word is, of course, a blend of man + explain. The practice of mansplaining dates to antiquity, but the word is quite recent, with a coinage in 2008. Writer Rebecca Solnit defined the concept and its consequences in a 13 April 2008 column in the Los Angeles Times, although she did not use the word; the word would be coined in the following months:

Men explain things to me, and to other women, whether or not they know what they’re talking about. Some men. Every woman knows what I mean. It’s the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men’s unsupported overconfidence.

About five weeks later, mansplaining appears on an internet discussion group. Whether there is a direct connection between the coinage and Solnit’s column, or if it was just an idea whose time had come, cannot be known. In either case, the following appeared on the Fandom_Wank discussion board in a discussion of the television series Supernatural. On 21 May 2021 a “male and fan of the show” who admittedly hadn’t yet seen the episodes in question made a couple of lengthy posts commenting on the misogyny exhibited by one of the characters on the show. To which, a user with the nom de internet phosfate posted:

Oh, gosh, thank you so much for mansplaining this to us!


On 1 August 2008 the following exchange about a performance art piece appeared on the site Livejournal.com that not only uses the word but demonstrates the misogynistic reaction that often accompanies its use:

imomus Fri, Aug. 1st, 2008 11:07 am (UTC)
Yes. “In the first section Shiomi walked up to a water tank on a table and put some crystals of copper sulfate into the water. After the copper sulfate caused an immediate chemical reaction and turned the water a vivid blue, she took the temperature of the water and announced it to the audience through a microphone. Next, while a stuffed pheasant swung from the ceiling in the dark, the four performers alternated sitting down and standing up, with flashlights directed at the vessel. In the last part, they brought chairs to the table, wrote words (specified by Shiomi) on cigarettes, and smoked them after announcing the word.”

electricwitch Fri, Aug. 1st, 2008 11:36 am (UTC)
I have to say it sounds pretty lolzy.

count_vronsky Fri, Aug. 1st, 2008 11:46 pm (UTC)
You crazy girl. It sounds amazing, and the dead pheasant is just this side of perfect. A sly take on the Last Supper (and the first supper—water into wine), or a time compression of all the suppers we will ever have. An absurdist comment on woman's maternal role as food provider, life as chemistry, and the sexual imagery of the after meal smoke.
Edited at 2008-08-01 11:47 pm (UTC)

electricwitch Fri, Aug. 1st, 2008 11:47 pm (UTC)
Wow, thank you so much for mansplaining this art to me! What with my arts degrees, I can't understand it at all!

count_vronsky Sat, Aug. 2nd, 2008 12:15 am (UTC)
“mansplaining!” lol.

count_vronsky Sat, Aug. 2nd, 2008 12:39 am (UTC)
And I am duly chastened e-witch, and grieved to have offended your petty but obviously sincere gender politics, but I meant no harm. Why is it “mansplaining” and not me just having a difference of opinion and expressing it to you? I mean does everything, even an innocuous comment—an expression of appreciation for a piece of art—have to be seen through the lens of your feminist principles? I would argue that that does as much injustice to my point of view as the perceived insult did to yours.

And this exchange appeared on Twitter on 28 April 2009:

A Lydia On Petze Street @lydia_petze · Apr 28, 2009
Replying to @renward
@renward  i don't know but this one guy with his solicitous whiny voice i wanna punch him in it arrrrrrrrrrrgh

NOT THE BEES @renward · Apr 28, 2009
@lydia_petze UGH, mansplainers are the worst. Let me speak in slow, condescending tones so the Women understand because I'm a Nice Guy.

The word quickly spread from there.

Discuss this post

Sources:

@renward, Twitter.com, 28 April 2009.

Comments on Imomus, “Fluxus on a Tourist Visa,” Livejournal.com, 1 August 2008. Archive.org.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, January 2018 (updated September 2019), s.v. mansplain, v., mansplainer, n.

phosfate, “Women Who Hate Dean Hating Women Hating... wait,” journalfen.net/community/fandom_wank, 21 May 2008. Archive.org. (Thanks to Farah F for finding and supplying me with the context and correct URL for this quotation.)

Solnit, Rebecca. “Men Who Explain Things,” Los Angeles Times, 13 April 2008.

Photo credit: Satxwdavis, date unknown, atlas obscura.com. https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/classmates Fair use of a copyrighted image to illustrate a topic under discussion.

 

quiz

“Quiz,” an 1839 painting by Edwin Landseer. In a demonstration of differences in size, Quiz, a Maltese dog, sits on a table, its paw on the snout of a St. Bernard. Next to him are an artist’s drawing tools. A mouse is in the foreground. Quiz belonge…

“Quiz,” an 1839 painting by Edwin Landseer. In a demonstration of differences in size, Quiz, a Maltese dog, sits on a table, its paw on the snout of a St. Bernard. Next to him are an artist’s drawing tools. A mouse is in the foreground. Quiz belonged to Queen Victoria’s mother, the Duchess of Kent.

23 July 2021 (slightly revised 26 July 2021)

(The 26 July revision unambiguously marks the older senses of quiz as archaic, no longer in common use. It also introduces the suggestion that the sense of a test or exam is a separate, more recent coinage unrelated to the older uses and the sense meaning a bandalore.)

The origin of quiz is unknown. It arises in the late eighteenth century, and it went through a number of semantic changes before it arrived at the common meanings today of a noun meaning a test of knowledge or a verb meaning to ask questions about a topic. Given its similarity to older words like inquisitive, it may have a root in Latin, but its early uses are very much in slang and have quite different meanings, so that assumption is by no means certain.

The earliest known appearance of quiz is in a 1780 poem by Roger Wittol, An Incredible Bore. Here it means an odd or eccentric person sense that is now archaic:

T’other morning I threw off my chains with my gown,
Took a place in the Dilly and dangled to town;
(You must know ’twas a scheme, as we knowing ones say,
’Tis a BORE to be there in a d-----’d modest way)
When I found myself plac’d ’twixt a chandler’s fat wife,
And a fellow who (damme) knew nothing of life.
Me thinks ’tis a pleasantish day, says the dame,
To which I assented, the Quiz did the same:
She wish’d that these outlandish troubles would clear,
For this ’Merikin war made candles so dear.---

Our Quiz, with a head plaister’d o’er like twelfth-cake,
And a large sausage curl just above a black neck,
Had a DITTO sky-blue on, except that his breeches
Were pink, and his boot-tops were work’d with white stitches;
Notwithstanding all this I presum’d to suppose
He was going to town, to the Hummums, or Lowe’s,
Or somewhere in the Garden, where all the world goes.

Quiz quickly gave birth to the adjectives quizzical and quizzy; the latter is also now archaic. Both adjectives meant odd or peculiar and were in place by 1785.

And it appears in a 1785 pamphlet for first-year students at Cambridge University, one of the many early uses of the word coming from a school setting. The pamphlet, titled Ten Minutes Advice to Freshmen, has this to say about being teased for being a quiz, testament that schoolyard teasing and bullying hasn’t changed much over the centuries:

If you are so unfortunate as to be pronounced a Quiz, don’t be ashamed of it.—A QUIZ generally means a regular fellow, and very often a respectable man.

You see one denominated a Quiz because he hangs his gown up every night, and brushes it, and puts the tassel of his cap in a paper;—another is so called because he wears his hair, or the fashion of his buckles, different from others of his own age.—If you have reasons for these distinctions, be not afraid to own them; say boldly in the words of Horace,
            “Justum et tenacem, &c.” [just and tenacious, etc.]
If you have no reasons, you may as well conform to the general custom of people about you.

That same year, 1785, Francis Grose includes it in his Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue:

QUIZ, a strange looking fellow, an odd dog.

Around this time, quiz could also mean a type of toy, also called a bandalore, that is an early form of what we now call a yo-yo. This sense of quiz appears in this rather misogynistic passage in the 1792 Sequel to the Adventures of Baron Munchausen:

As to the matrons, to prevent an eternal and confused prattle that would drown all manner of intelligibility, I found it absolutely necessary to sew up their mouths; so that between the blind judges and the dumb matrons, methought, the trial had a chance of being terminated sooner that it otherwise could. The matrons, instead of their tongues, had other instruments to convey their ideas: Each of them had three quizzes, on quiz pendant from the string that sewed up her mouth, and another quiz in either hand. When she wished to express her negative, she darted and recoiled the quizzes in her right and left hand; and when she desired to express her affirmative, she, nodding, made the quiz pendant flow down and recoil again.

The toy probably got this name from being a novelty, an oddity. It is not a great leap from being considered odd to being mocked, and by 1787 the verb to quiz, meaning to mock, appears. From the humor periodical The Microcosm of 4 June 1787:

Riding through Eton about a week ago with my nose before me,
Nescio quid meditans, nugarum, et totus in illis.
[Musing on some trifle or other, and totally intent on it; Horace, Satires 1.9]

Meditating, indeed, on I know not what, I was awakened from my reverie by several provincial words, the meaning of which were to me, at that time, almost unintelligible; although by the gestures which accompanied them, it was no difficult matter to discover that were not intended by way of compliment, “There’s a quiz! there’s a good one! my God! what a Gig! what a tough one! Smoke his nose!”

Notwithstanding I perceived that these expressions proceeded from several young Etonians, not one of whom had arrived at the age of thirteen, my indignation was foolishly roused. I long’d for the trumpeter’s sord, and, in the first ebullitions of rage, idly made use of some very hasty expressions. I was lucky for both parties, but especially for myself, that I had nothing in my hand but a small flexible switch. However, my anger was momentary; I soon collected all my lost philosophy, repeating those lines of Horace, to which theorists often have recourse.

———————animum rege! qui nisi paret
Imperat: hunc frænis, hunc tu compesce catenâ
[Rule your passion! For unless it obeys, it commands; restrain it with a bridle, restrain it with fetters; Horace, Epistles 1.2]

But it was too late, I had provoked the boys to resentment. Several now ran to the head of my beast,

———————Nec Saxa, nec ullum
Telorum interca cessat genus.
[Nor meanwhile do stones nor any kind of missiles cease; Virgil, Aeneid, Book 2)

Many pieces of mud and some stones were thrown, notwithstanding I advanced safe under cover my nose, still quizzed, and still pelted, till my quadruped arrived opposite the schoolgate.

And quiz would come to mean ridicule or mockery. From a 1795 poem Soliloquy on the Powder Tax, a parody of Hamlet’s famed soliloquy:

To pay, or not to pay? That is the question.—
Whether its better in the mind to suffer
The laughs and quizzes of the powder’d pates;
Or to take arms against so many troubles,
And by a guinea end them?

Around the same time, quiz came to mean to spy upon or watch closely, as one might stare at an odd person or thing. From Miles Peter Andrews’s 1795 play The Mysteries of the Castle:

Long has been serv’d from this our motley Stage,
Repasts for various tastes—from youth to age—
To lively Miss, escap’d from Sſhool and toil,
Our sports have oft bestow’d the infant smile,
While the rude boy, from Westminster or Eton,
Who “spies,” and “quizzes” one, where’er they meet one.

(The use of a medial or long S in Sſhool as a replacement for a < c > or as part of an initial double < s > is odd to my eyes—but I’m not an expert in eighteenth-century typographical practices. In my quotations, including the other examples in this quotation, I have replaced medial esses with the modern, round form, but I leave it as is in this word.)

This sense of watching closely or peering intently may serve as a transition to the present-day sense of quiz meaning a test in school The test sense of quiz arose in the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century. But this test sense could also be an independent coinage based on the Latin root at the heart of words like inquisitive. The verb to quiz, meaning to question or test, especially in the context of a school, appears in Harper’s of June 1866:

Professor H——, of the Iowa Medical College, is an inveterate joker, as his friends know to their grief. His best joking field is among the students, who semi-annually throng his school for instruction in the healing art. But once upon a time an ex-military student of his classes flanked and vanquished him by one of those deceptive movements known generically as “strategy.” Professor H—— was lecturing his class upon the diseases of the cranium generally, and accidents to that locality specially; and, to conclude, quizzed them thoroughly on the difference between fracture of the skull and concussion of the brain, and was pleased to see that all understood it, but was annoyed and pained to find that the military man couldn’t see it.

[...]

On this occasion, when he found the young man still ignorant of the subject, he patiently went through a long and tedious explanation, in the most commonplace terms, and then asked, [...] “Now what would you do first if you had a fracture of the skull?

“I think I would send for a doctor?”

Such a shout as greeted the disgusted Professor at this reply would have broken up a Western camp meeting. There was no more lecturing that day.

And the next year William James uses the noun quiz, meaning such a text or exam, in an 1867 letter that also demonstrates that precarious career prospects of academics are nothing new:

At present my health is so uncertain that I cannot look forward to teaching physiology. As a central point of study I imagine that the border ground of physiology and psychology, overlapping both, would be as fruitful as any, and I am now working on to it. But a cultivator thereof can make no money. Occasional review articles, etc., perhaps giving “quizzes” in anatomy and physiology, and getting work to do for medical periodicals, may help along. If I wrote with more facility I fancy the latter might be productive. My ambition is modest, as you see, but my wants will not be numerous.

In addition to the supposed Latin etymology, there is another, almost certainly specious, origin story for quiz. The following appeared in an 1836 pronouncing dictionary, titled Walker Remodelled, and has been repeated many times since:

All these words, which occur only in vulgar or colloquial use, and which Webster traces to learned roots, originated as a joke: Daly, the manager of a Dublin play-house, wagered that a word of no meaning should be the common talk and puzzle of the city in twenty-four hours; in the course of that time the letters Q,u,i,z were chalked or pasted on all the walls of Dublin with an effect that won the wager.

Richard Daly was an Irish actor and theater manager, and in 1779-80 he returned to Dublin from London and purchased the Smock Alley Theatre. So, the chronology works for this explanation, but there is little else to recommend its veracity. The early citations of quiz are not associated with Ireland.

Discuss this post

Sources:

Andrews, Miles Peter. The Mysteries of the Castle. London: T.N. Longman, 1795, 3. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

“Editor’s Drawer.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, June 1866, 134–35. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2021, s.v. quiz, n., quiz, v.

Grose, Francis. A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. London: S. Hooper, 1785, s.v. quiz. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

James, William. Letter (26 December 1867). Ralph Barton Perry. The Thought and Character of William James, vol. 1 of 2. Boston: Little Brown, 1935, 254. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Microcosm, no. 29, 4 June 1787, 336–38. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2008, modified, December 2020, s.v. quiz, n., quiz, v.1, quizzical, adj.; June 2008, modified June 2018, s.v., quizzy, adj.1.

A Sequel to the Adventures of Baron Munchausen. London: H.D. Symonds and J. Owen, 1792, 177–79. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

Smart, B.H. Walker Remodelled: A New Critical Pronouncing Dictionary of the English Language, London: T. Cadell, 1836, s.v. Quizzing, s. and a.

“Soliloquy on the Powder Tax” (August 1795). The Kentish Register, and Monthly Miscellany, vol. 3. Canterbury: Simmons and Kirkby, 1795, 310. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

Ten Minutes Advice to Freshmen. Cambridge: J. Archdeacon, 1785, 31–32. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

Tréguer, Pascal. “Origin of ‘Quiz’ (‘Vir Bonus Est Quis?’)?” Wordhistories.net, 12 May 2017.

Wittol, Roger. An Incredible Bore: A Familiar Epistle. London: G. Kearsly, 1780, 13–14. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

Image credit: Edwin Henry Landseer, “Quiz,” 1839, oil on canvas, Royal Collection. Public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a work created before 1927.

two-spirit

298_twospirit.jpg

Turn-of-the-twentieth century photo of We’wha, a Zuni lahamana, a male-bodied person who wears a mixture of men’s and women’s clothing and performs social and ceremonial roles associated with women. A Zuni person in traditional dress sitting on the floor and weaving.

21 July 2021

Two-spirit or two-spirited is a term for Indigenous North American people who do not conform to the cis-heterosexual norm of white, settler-colonist society. It is a relatively recent coinage, created as a calque of the Ojibwe niizh manidoowag, but that phrase has no traditional cultural significance or currency in Ojibwe culture. Two-spirit is an English-language term.

The concept of gender variability is not consistent across Indigenous North American cultures, and different tribes have their own terms with meanings that fit the cultural contexts of each particular group. Such terms include: nádleehé (Navajo), winkte (Lakota), warharmi (Kamia), hwame (Mohave), and lhamana (Zuni).

Two-spirit evokes the concept, present in some Indigenous traditions, of a person who presents the affect of both male and female genders, while biologically conforming to either the male or female sex. But from its coinage, two-spirit has been used as an umbrella term, including people from across the spectrum of gender variability, including those who in settler-colonist contexts would be labeled as gay, lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, queer, transgender, non-binary, drag queen, or butch.

Two-spirit was coined at the Third Annual Inter-Tribal Native American, First Nations, Gay and Lesbian American Conference held in 1990 in Winnipeg, Manitoba. It was deliberately invented as a replacement for the French word berdache, which had been borrowed into English by anthropologists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This word and its English variant bardash also have the sense of a male prostitute, and as a result, despite being widely used in scholarly literature, berdache and bardash are considered to be slurs. But a new term was needed because the usual English ones, such as gay or lesbian, did not reflect the unique aspects of gender variability in Indigenous cultures. Thus, two-spirit was coined.

There is testimony as to the coinage of the term at the 1990 Winnipeg conference, but as far as I can tell there are no written proceedings from that meeting. The earliest written use of two-spirit I have found is in the name of an Indigenous women’s dance troupe. An article in Boston’s Gay Community News of 25 May 1991 mentions a scheduled performance of that group at the National Lesbian Conference in Atlanta, held 24–28 April 1991, that was cancelled because of organizational and diversity concerns:

The Two Spirited Dance Troupe, a Native American company, was scheduled to open the Thursday night plenary session. However, in solidarity with Spotted Eagle, the group did not perform. By this time Spotted Eagle had her own schedule changed so many times without being consulted that she decided to opt out.

By that fall, two-spirit was appearing in mainstream newspapers as an adjective, albeit in quotation marks. From the Minneapolis Star Tribune of 9 September 1991:

Some Indians said that, before boarding schools and white missionaries erased many traditional tribal beliefs, “two-spirit” people—gays and lesbians—held places of honor in native cultures.

Now, some American Indian gays and lesbians contend, European biases have replaced those old traditions.

Two-spirit, however, is not a universally accepted term, and even those who regard it as a valuable addition to the language recognize that it has its limitations. In the introduction to their 1997 book Two-Spirit People, a collection of articles on Native American gender and sexuality, editors Sue-Ellen Jacobs, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang write:

The English phrase two-spirit, which originated primarily in urban Native American/First Nations contexts where English serves as a lingua franca to bridge cultural and linguistic differences, is not meant to be translated into Native American languages and terms. To do so may change the common meaning it has acquired since the early 1990s by self-identified two-spirit Native Americans. In some cultural contexts, translating it to a Native language could even be dangerous. For example, if "two-spirit" were translated into one of the Athapaskan languages (such as Navajo or Apache) the word could be understood to mean that such a person possesses both a living and a dead spirit—not a desirable situation. If "two-spirit" were translated into Shoshone, the literal translation would be "ghost." As a generic term for Native American gays, lesbians, transgendered individuals, and other persons who are not heterosexual or who are ambivalent in terms of gender, it is used in urban and rural environments, but not by all Native Americans who are, for example, self-identified as "gay," "lesbian," "bisexual," "transgender," or "third gender" (that is, people who are neither women nor men within systems of multiple genders). Some reject the term just as others reject "berdache."

And Cherokee scholar Daniel Heath Justice, in his 2018 Why Indigenous Literatures Matter, notes:

It was coined to affirm the spiritual and cultural groundings of queer Indigenous folks, and to argue that Indigenous gender diversity and same-sex relationships included but were more than sexual acts or proclivities. It’s an important term of self-affirmation, and one that many people use today, especially in Canada. But it’s also a pan-Indigenous term that in many cases presumes a generic similarity across cultures, which is decidedly not the case, and does not translate well into many culturally specific understandings from communities with historical roles that we might today identify as similar to gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender identities. That doesn’t mean we didn’t or don’t exist in these communities—that we didn’t or don’t matter. It just means that the broad concept of “two-spirit” might not be the best terminology for describing the culturally specific realities of gender diversity and sexuality expressions in all contexts.

Discuss this post

Sources:

BonaDea, Maridee. “‘The Point Is We Tried’; The National Lesbian Conference Was at Times Contentious, at Times Victorious.” Gay Community News (Boston), 25 May 1991, 9. ProQuest: Magazines.

de Vries, Kylan Mattias. “Berdache (Two-Spirit).” Encyclopedia of Gender and Society, Jodi O’Brien, ed. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, 2009.    

Driskill, Qwo-Li, Daniel Heath Justice, Deborah A. Miranda, and Lisa Tatonetti, eds. Sovereign Erotics: A Collection of Two-Spirit Literature. Tucson: U of Arizona Press, 2011, 4–6.

Jacobs, Sue-Ellen, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang, eds. Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality. Urbana: U of Illinois Press, 1997, 2, 3–4. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Justice, Daniel Heath. Why Indigenous Literatures Matter. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2018, 102–03.

Kelly, Suzanne P. “Gays Seek Niche in Minority Communities: Balancing Racial and Sexual Identities Can Be Difficult.” Star Tribune (Minneapolis), 9 September 1991, 9A. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Lang, Sabine. “Various Kinds of Two-Spirit People.” In Sue-Ellen Jacobs, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang, eds. Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality. Urbana: U of Illinois Press, 1997, 100, 103. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, draft additions, June 2015, s.v. two, adj., n., and adv.

Photo credit: John K. Hillers, c.1871–c.1907. U.S. National Archives. Public domain image.

Columbia

WWI-era depiction of a personified Columbia reaching out to the American people. A woman in stars-and-stripes clothing, including a star-spangled liberty cap, facing the viewer with arms outstretched

WWI-era depiction of a personified Columbia reaching out to the American people. A woman in stars-and-stripes clothing, including a star-spangled liberty cap, facing the viewer with arms outstretched.

20 July 2021

Columbia is a poetic name for the Americas, and more specifically the United States. The name, of course, is homage to the genocidal killer Christopher Columbus, who stumbled upon the Americas by mistake, and who never, despite overwhelming evidence that he had not, in fact, reached Asia, admitted his error. There are numerous places named after the man, but the most prominent in English-speaking North America are the District of Columbia, the Columbia River, and British Columbia.

There is no single Indigenous name for the Americas. Perhaps the closest is Turtle Island, a name given by some North American Indigenous cultures to their homeland. The name comes from a legend that the earth was formed on the back of a turtle swimming in the sea of the universe.

Of course, the early European settler-colonists did not hold the Indigenous cultures they encountered in any regard. The adjectival form Columbian appears in the early seventeenth century. From Samuel Purchas’s 1625 travelogue Purchas His Pilgrimes:

And vnto Portugall was Spaine beholden for Columbus, and Columbus also for his skill, whereby the Columbian (so fitlier named, then American) World was discouered.

The feminized noun form (it is common to render Latin toponyms as feminine) Columbia is in place by the mid eighteenth century. William Douglass’s description of British possessions in North America uses the term. The last digit of the date in the digitized copy I have access to is illegible, but is probably a nine, making the date 1749. From the dates and events in the text, the book had to have been written in the closing years of that decade:

The whole Continent was called by his Name AMERICA. Here is a notable Instance of the Caprice of Mankind in giving this newly discovered Continent the Name America instead of Columbia: Americus made no Settlement, Columbus was not only the first, but also the more general Discoverer of this Land.

The United States’ constitution, written in 1789, calls for a federal district to house the country’s government, and ten square miles were carved out of Maryland and Virginia to form what would be called the District of Columbia. The newly created city was also known as Washington, probably to distinguish the new construction from the towns of Georgetown and Alexandria already existing in the district. (Virginia later reclaimed its portion, which included Alexandria.) The name District of Columbia is in place by 1791. From the Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser of 26 September 1791:

The City of WASHINGTON, in the district of Columbia, intended for the permanent seat of the Government of the United States, being now begun, a concise description of the situation, and present state of that metropolis, may not be altogether uninteresting to those at a distance.

On the other side of the continent is the Columbia River, the largest North American river to flow into the Pacific. Again, the settler-colonists ignored the Indigenous names for the river, one of which is is Nch'i-Wana (Great River) in Sahaptin, a language of the region. The Spanish dubbed the river Río de San Roque (Saint Roch River). But in 1792, American Captain Robert Gray and his ship Columbia Rediviva (Columbus Renewed) sailed into the river. Gray named the river after his ship, ignoring both the Spanish and Indigenous predecessors.

Later, the Hudson’s Bay Company established two administrative districts west of the Rockies. The northern one they designated as New Caledonia, and the southern one, which covered the Columbia River basin, was called Columbia. (Most of the HBC southern district was in what is now the United States.)

The British government took control of the territory from the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1858, and the question of what to call the new colony arose. The first choice was New Caledonia, but that name proved unsuitable because it was also the name of the French territory in the South Pacific. In a letter to Edward Bulwer-Lytton, then the British secretary of state for the colonies, Queen Victoria selected the name British Columbia. Victoria writes in the third person:

The Queen has received Sir E. Bulwer Lytton's letter. If the name of "New Caledonia" is objected to as being already borne by another colony or island claimed by the French, it may be better to give the new colony west of the Rocky Mountains another name. New Hanover, New Cornwall, and New Georgia appear from the maps to be the names of subdivisions of that country, but do not appear on all maps. The only name which is given to the whole territory in every map the Queen has consulted is "Columbia", but as there exists also a Columbia in South America, and the citizens of the United States call their country also Columbia, at least in poetry, "British Columbia" might be, in the Queen's opinion, the best name.

Three days later, the British Parliament officially named the colony British Columbia. As reported by the Manchester Guardian of 27 July 1858:

The Earl of CARNARVON, in moving the second reading of this bill, explained at some length the nature of its provisions, and stated that the Government intended to alter the name of the colony from New Caledonia to British Columbia.

Discuss this post

Sources:

“BC Geographical Names.” Province of British Columbia, accessed 8 July 2021.

Douglass, William. A Summary, Historical and Political, of the First Planting, Progressive Improvements, and Present State of the British Settlements in North-America. Boston: Rogers and Fowle, c.1749, 65. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Everett-Heath, John. Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Place Names, sixth ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2020, s.v. Columbia, District of Columbia, British Columbia. Oxfordreference.com.

“For the Maryland Journal” (26 September 1791). Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser, 30 September 1791, 3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. Columbian, adj. and n.

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Image credit: Paul Stahr. “Be Patriotic,” c.1917–18, gouache on paper. National Archives. Public domain image.