Spain

The Phoenicians arrived on the Iberian coast around 1100 BCE and called the land something close to 'I-Shaphan,' meaning land of the hyrax, a small mammal they recognized from the Levant. Roman writers, including Pliny the Elder in his Natural History of 77 CE, took up the name but applied it to rabbits, which overran the peninsula in such numbers that they undermined the foundations of buildings. The Latin form 'Hispania' preserves that original Semitic observation, however imprecisely translated. What the Phoenicians saw, Rome encoded.

Julius Caesar administered Hispania Ulterior as governor in 61 BCE and returned there as conqueror in 45 BCE, winning the battle of Munda. Augustus later reorganized the peninsula into three provinces: Hispania Tarraconensis, Hispania Baetica, and Lusitania. In the spoken Latin of soldiers and merchants, the initial H weakened and began to drop. By the 4th century CE, 'Spania' appeared in official documents alongside the older form.

When Visigothic kings replaced Roman governors in the 5th century, they inherited the name and kept it. The Moorish conquest of 711 CE introduced 'Al-Andalus' for the conquered south, and 'España' retreated to the northern Christian kingdoms holding the mountains. Over seven centuries of reconquest, those kingdoms slowly reclaimed the name for the whole peninsula. Ferdinand and Isabella completed the Reconquista in 1492, and their scribes wrote 'España' across official documents from Castile to Granada.

Old French carried the name as 'Espaigne,' adding the initial vowel that Romance languages often prepended to words beginning with 'sp.' English borrowed 'Spayne' or 'Spaign' in the 14th century from that French form. As Spain became the dominant Atlantic power in the 16th century, English writers simplified the spelling to 'Spain,' dropping the French vowel prefix. The word had traveled from a Phoenician observation about rabbits to the name of the century's greatest empire.