A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1467 entries
endonym
An endonym is the name a place or a people uses for itself, in its own language. Deutschland is the endonym of the country English calls Germany. Kalaallit Nunaat is the endonym of Greenland. Denali is the endonym of the mountain that appeared on American maps for most of a century as McKinley. The paired term is exonym, the name outsiders use.
Etymology
The word is built from Greek pieces meaning inside and name, and it was coined in the middle of the twentieth century by geographers working on how maps should handle names. It belongs to a small family of terms made the same way: an autonym is what a people calls itself, a toponym is a place name, and a hydronym is the name of a body of water.
Notes
Hydronyms are the most conservative names on any map. River names routinely survive the arrival of a new language when everything else is replaced, which is why the oldest surviving words in a landscape are usually the names of its rivers. Mapping agencies have moved steadily toward endonyms over the past several decades, and the United Nations maintains a standing group on the question.