[3] Some have speculated that the Bodo word "Ha-com" meaning low land was Sanskritised to 'Asama', dating its origin to at least first millennium common era.
[4] While some believe the name Asama is a Sanskrit originated word which means unparalleled because of its unequal terrain with hills interspersed with valleys[5] Banikanta Kakati quotes Grierson in Linguistic Survey of India[6] that "While the Shan called themselves Tai, they came to be referred to as Āsām, Āsam and sometimes as Acam by the indigenous people of the country.
The epithet applied to the Shan conquerors was subsequently transferred to the country over which they ruled and thus the name Kāmarūpa was replaced by Āsām, which ultimately took the Sanskritized form Asama, meaning "unequalled, peerless or uneven"[7] Satyendranath Sarma repeats this derivation while quoting Kakati.
[9] Satyendra Nath Sarma writes "Assamese is the easternmost Indo-Aryan language of India, spoken by nearly eight millions of people inhabiting mostly the Brahmaputra valley of Assam.
It is based on the English word Assam by which the British rulers referred to the tract covered by the Brahmaputra valley and its adjoining areas.
[10] The earliest epigraphic mention of the Assam region comes from Samudragupta's Allahabad stone pillar from the fourth century CE, where it is called Kamarupa.
[13] Assam, Asam and other variations started appearing in relatively recent times, and their uses cannot be attributed to any period earlier than the sixteenth century,[14] and is associated with the Shan invaders.
Locally, Vaishnavite writers and biographers used different forms of the name indiscriminately (e.g. Āsām, Āsam, Asam) to refer to the Ahom community.
[20] The relevant stanza[21] is (in iTrans): kiraTa kachhaari khaachi gaaro miri yavana ka~Nka govaala | asama maluka[22] dhobaa ye turuka kubaacha mlechchha chaNDaala || The Ahoms were called Asam in the eighteenth century Darrangraj Vamshavali of Suryya Khari Daibajna;[18] variously as Āsām, Āsam, and Asam in the seventeenth century Shankar-carit of Daityari Thakur;[19] and Acam in Kamrupar Buranji.
[30] One of the first unambiguous references comes from Thomas Bowrey in 1663 about Mir Jumla's death: "They lost the best of Nabobs, the Kingdome of Acham, and, by consequence, many large privileges".
[33] In various documents of the British East India Company relating to the last few Ahom kings, the name of country was mentioned as Assam.
One of the earliest theories published was provided by Baden-Powell in 1896, when he proposed that the name could possibly derive from the Bodo Ha-com, meaning "low or level country".
[6] Though both explanations have been rejected in the academic literature, the notion that the name Assam has a Sanskrit origin continues to hold sway in popular perceptions, due mainly to two standard dictionaries of Assamese: Hemkox and Chandrakanta Abhidhan.
[53] Masica too believes that Assam derives from an earlier attested form of asam, acam which in turn is from a Burmese corruption of the name Shan/Shyam.
[1] (Kakati 1953) derives the name from a Tai root, cham (defeated), with an Indic prefix for negation, a-, so that a-cham would mean undefeated.