Algeria

The word Algeria comes from French Algérie, the name French administrators gave to their North African territory after occupying Algiers in 1830. Algiers itself takes its name from the Arabic al-Jazā'ir, meaning the islands, referring to a small cluster of rocky islets that once lay just off the coast in the Bay of Algiers. Most of those islands were joined to the mainland in the nineteenth century by landfill, erasing the very geography the name records.

The full medieval Arabic name was Jazā'ir Banī Mazghanna, the Islands of the Beni Mzghenna, a Berber tribal confederation that controlled the coast before the Arab conquest of the seventh century. When the Zirids, a Berber dynasty, refounded the city around 960 CE under Buluggin ibn Ziri, the Arab geographer al-Bakri described it as a town of little consequence. That changed in 1516, when the Ottoman admiral Hayreddin Barbarossa captured Algiers, expelled the Spanish garrison from the offshore fortress of Peñón de Argel, and made the city a major naval base.

Under Ottoman rule, Algiers became one of the Mediterranean's most feared ports. The Barbary corsairs who sailed from there raided as far north as Iceland in the 1620s, seizing ships and enslaving their crews. Miguel de Cervantes was held captive in Algiers for five years before 1580, and he returned to the city repeatedly in his writing. The name Algerie appeared in French diplomatic correspondence before the conquest of 1830, reflecting long familiarity with the city.

France formalized Algérie as the administrative name in 1839 under Governor-General Valée, adding the standard French territorial suffix. The Anglophone world adopted Algeria directly from that French form. When Algeria won independence on July 5, 1962, it chose al-Jumhuriyya al-Jazā'iriyya al-Dimuqratiyya al-Sha'biyya, the People's Democratic Republic of Algeria, keeping al-Jazā'ir at its heart. The name of islands that the city eventually buried is now the name of a country of 45 million people.