Английский Этимологический словарь - america

- 1507, in Cartographer Martin Waldseemьller's treatise "Cosmographiae Introductio," from Mod.L. Americanus, after Amerigo Vespucci (1454-1512) who made two trips to the New World as a navigator and claimed to have discovered it. His published works put forward the idea that it was a new continent, and he was first to call it Novus Mundus "New World." Amerigo is more easily Latinized than Vespucci. American (n.) originally meant what are now called Native Americans; the sense of "resident of America of European descent" is first recorded 1765. American dream first recorded 1931. Amerind coined 1899 at the Bureau of American Ethnology from American Indian.