Egypt

The English word Egypt descends from the Greek Aigyptos, which Greek speakers used by at least 700 BCE. Homer uses Aigyptos in the Odyssey to refer to both the country and the Nile river itself. The Greeks most likely borrowed this from the ancient Egyptian phrase Hwt-ka-Ptah, meaning House of the Ka of Ptah, the formal name of Memphis and its great temple to the god Ptah.

The phrase Hwt-ka-Ptah in Egyptian pronunciation sounded something like Hikuptah. Greek speakers, hearing this through Phoenician intermediaries and their own trade contacts, reshaped it into Aigyptos. It was a common pattern in ancient name transmission: the name of a city or temple became the name for the whole country, stripped of its religious meaning. By the time Alexander the Great arrived in 332 BCE, Aigyptos was the standard Greek name.

Latin adopted the Greek form directly as Aegyptus, which passed into Old French as Egypte and into Middle English as Egipte by the 13th century. The Arabic name for the country, Misr, has a completely separate Semitic origin, tracing to roots meaning border or settled land. Modern Egyptians use Misr in everyday speech; Egypt is an outsider's term, the Greek name that stuck.

Ancient Egyptian scribes called their own land Kemet, meaning the Black Land, a reference to the dark fertile soil left by the Nile flood, as distinct from the red desert. So the country that gave the world one of its oldest writing systems has, in English, a name that passed through at least four languages: Egyptian, Greek, Latin, and French. The word Egypt carries inside it a temple that no longer stands.