Former Names of Current Places Quiz

The Dutch developed the New Amsterdam settlement in 1626. The colony was seized at the behest of English nobleman James, duke of York (later King James II), in 1664 and was renamed in his honor.

Greek speakers would refer to their trips to Constantinople as eis tēn polin, meaning “into the city,” which morphed over time into the name Istanbul. When the Ottoman Empire crumbled in the early 20th century, its successor state, the Republic of Turkey, officially changed the name of the ancient city.

In this case, the name of the city hasn’t changed, only the way it is translated. Early attempts to romanize the names of Chinese places rendered the city Peking. During the mid- to late 20th century, China’s government adopted a new form of romanization that rendered the city’s name Beijing in Western languages. Some remnants of Peking remain: Beijing is the home of Peking University, and its airport code is PEK.

Partly because of the anti-German sentiment stemming from World War I, in 1914 Russia changed the name of St. Petersburg to Petrograd (-burg being a suffix of German origin meaning “city” or “town”). After communist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin died in 1924, the city was renamed Leningrad in his honor. During the collapse of communism in Russia, the city was once again called St. Petersburg.

The name Bombay is thought to have been a corruption of the word Mumbai from the British colonial period or possibly the phrase Bom Baim (“Good Harbor”), which supposedly was a name used by the Portuguese for the area.

Persia was the name given by the Greeks thousands of years ago to the area today known as Iran. In 1935, during a campaign to modernize the country, its ruler Reza Shah changed Persia to Iran, a name which had been used internally for centuries.

In the years following the downfall of Siam’s absolute monarchy in 1932, the country’s military took a greater role in governance. In 1939 the military regime adopted the name Thailand, meaning “land of the free.”

When North Vietnam took over Saigon in 1975, they renamed the city after Ho Chi Minh, the founder of the Indochina Communist Party.

The area today known as Mexico was known as New Spain from the fall of the Aztec empire in 1521 until Mexican independence in 1821.

British explorer James Cook landed in the Hawaiian Islands in 1778 and named them the Sandwich Islands in honor of the earl of Sandwich, who was Britain’s first lord of the Admiralty (as well as the namesake of the sandwich). The name was used in several treaties until it fell out of favor about the 1840s, during a period of Hawaiian self-determination.

The Dutch expanded into the islands off the coast of Southeast Asia during the 18th and 19th centuries. During World War II Japan captured many of the Dutch holdings in that area. After the war, the Netherlands unsuccessfully tried to regain control. Indonesia gained independence in 1949.

In 1603 the Tokugawa shogunate, a military dictatorship, ruled Japan from the small fishing village of Edo, while the figurehead royal family remained in the official capital of Kyōto. Edo flourished for hundreds of years. The shogunate ended in 1867, and imperial power was restored. The following year, the emperor moved the official capital to Edo and renamed it Tokyo, which means “eastern capital.”

Sri Lanka dropped the name Ceylon, an English modification of the name given to the island by the Portuguese, when it enacted a new constitution in 1972. The Sri Lankan government has scrubbed the old name off nearly all of its buildings and businesses, except for Ceylon tea, whose name is thought to be integral to the brand.

The partition of British India in 1947 created West and East Pakistan, two noncontiguous regions more than a thousand miles apart awkwardly lumped together as one country because both had a majority Muslim population. Tensions over different cultures and languages, as well as a power imbalance favoring West Pakistan, led to the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971.

The name Congo comes from the Congo River, itself named for the Kongo people who inhabit land near the river’s mouth. In 1960 Belgian Congo gained independence from Belgium, becoming the Republic of the Congo, later adding Democratic to their name. Eleven years later, dictator Mobutu Sese Seko changed the country’s name to Zaire, which he considered more authentically African (Zaire means “great river” in some local African languages). When he was ousted in 1997, the name reverted to Democratic Republic of the Congo.