Demonyms for the United States

All forms of English refer to US citizens as Americans, a term deriving from the United States of America, the country's official name.

[2] Other languages, including French, Japanese, and Russian, use cognates of American to refer to people from the United States.

Amerigo Vespucci first demonstrated that Brazil and the West Indies did not represent Asia's eastern outskirts as conjectured by Christopher Columbus, but instead constituted an entirely separate landmass hitherto unknown to the peoples of the Old World.

[1] English use of the term American for people of European descent dates to the 17th century, with the earliest recorded appearance being in Thomas Gage's The English-American: A New Survey of the West Indies in 1648.

[1] In English, American came to be applied especially to people in British America and thus its use as a demonym for the United States derives by extension.

[1] International speakers of English generally refer to people from the United States as Americans while equivalent translations of American are used in many other languages, namely Italian (americano), Dutch (Amerikaan), Afrikaans (Amerikaner), Japanese (アメリカ人, rōmaji: amerika-jin), Filipino (Amerikano), Hebrew (אמריקני or אמריקאי), Arabic (أمريكي), Portuguese (americano), Russian (американец, американка) and Hindi (अमरीकी transliteration: Amreeki).

The style manual of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, a leading German-language newspaper, dismisses the term US-amerikanisch as both "unnecessary" and "artificial" and recommends replacing it with amerikanisch.

In Latin American Spanish colloquial speech, Americans may be referred to as gringos (likely originating from griego, meaning Greek), but the word usually carries a disparaging connotation; in Spain and Argentina, a more common word with a similar meaning to gringo is yanqui (from the English Yankee).

There are separate demonyms derived from each word and a United States citizen is referred to as 美国人 (Pinyin: měiguó rén; Jyutping: mei5 gwok3 yan4).

Several single-word English alternatives for American have been suggested over time, especially Usonian, popularized by architect Frank Lloyd Wright,[20] and the nonce term United-Statesian.