Name of the Czech Republic
[5] The Czech name Čechy is from the same root but means Bohemia, the westernmost and largest historical region of modern Czechia.
The name Bohemia is an exonym derived from the Boii, a Celtic tribe inhabiting the area before the early Slavs arrived.
The digraph "cž" was used from the time of the 16th-century Bible of Kralice until the reform of 1842, being eventually replaced by "č" (changing Cžechy to Čechy).
In the late 19th century the suffix for the names of countries changed from -y to -sko (e.g. Rakousy → Rakousko for Austria, Uhry → Uhersko for Hungary).
While the notion of Česko appears for the first time in 1704, it only came into official use in 1918 as the first part of the name of the newly independent Czechoslovakia (Česko-Slovensko or Československo) .
Some Czech politicians and public figures (e.g. media magnate Vladimír Železný) expressed concern about the non-use of Česko and Czechia.
[24][25] The historical English name of the country is Bohemia, derived ultimately from Germanic Boi-haima, meaning "home of the Boii", a Celtic tribe who inhabited the area from the 4th century BC.
The name survived all the later migrations affecting the area, including the arrival of the Slavs and the creation of the Czech state.
The Bohemian state included the three historical lands: Bohemia proper (Čechy), Moravia (Morava) and Silesia (Slezsko).
[26][27] The first known usage of the word Czechia in English comes from a book of 1841 by Henry and Thomas Rose, A New General Biographical Dictionary Projected and Partly Arranged.
[40] Cyprien Robert in Le monde gréco-slave (1843), writes, that between Slovakia and Czechia proper, or the Kingdom of Bohemia, lies the Duchy of Moravia, which, along with several Silesian districts, is also an integral part of the territory of the Czech Slavs.
[43] Furthermore, the designation Czechia is mentioned, for example, by Pavel Stránský ze Záp in his work Respublica Bojema from 1634, who mentions it already in his first chapter De situ qualitatibusque Bojemiae: "Europaei orbis ea regio, quam (quemadmodum Chorographis placet) inter longitudinis gradum trigesimum quartum et quintum aliquanto ultra trigesimum octavum, et inter latitudinis gradum quadragesimum octavum et nonum ad quinquagesimum primum, gens mea colit, usitato jam nomine Bojemia, seu Bohemia, et Boemia, itemque Czechia vocatur.".
In Emanuel Tonner's translation, 1893: On the location and nature of the country of Bohemia: "That country in Europe, that part of the world, in which (as geographers teach) according to the longitude between the thirty-fourth and fifth degrees to the thirty-eighth, and according to the latitude between the forty-eighth and ninth degrees to the fifty-first, the Bohemians (Čechové, Czechs, i.e. Czech people) inhabit, my nation, by its usual name, is called Bohemia (Čechy, i.e. Czechia").
[52] On 26 September 2016, the International Organization for Standardization included the short name Czechia in the official ISO 3166 country codes list.
[53][54] In November 2016 the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs presented recommendations on how to use the short name Czechia in international contexts.
[55] On 1 June 2017, the geography department of the Faculty of Sciences of Charles University in Prague organized a special conference to assess the progress of the name's proliferation.
[56] In 2018, the European Union updated its official guidelines and replaced "Czech Republic" with "Czechia" as the short name of the country.
[62] In 2021, the government of the United States started using the form Czechia instead of Czech Republic as the short name for the country.
[69] NATO, the World Bank, FIFA, ISU and the Universal Postal Union switched to Czechia in October 2022.
