Every country that has changed its name

A world map is a snapshot, not a permanent record. Around forty countries have changed their names since 1945, several within the last decade, and a few more have asked the world to stop translating the name they already had.

The changes are not random. They fall into four reasonably clean categories, and once you can see which is which, the individual cases stop being trivia and start being history.

1. Independence

The largest group by far. A colonial name is a name chosen by someone else, so shedding it is often among the first acts of a new state.

• Ceylon → Sri Lanka (1972). Independent since 1948, but the British-era name lasted another 24 years until the country became a republic.
• Gold Coast → Ghana (1957), named for the medieval Ghana Empire — which was actually located some distance to the north-west.
• Bechuanaland → Botswana and Basutoland → Lesotho, both 1966.
• Dahomey → Benin (1975), after the Bight of Benin rather than the Kingdom of Benin, which was in what is now Nigeria.
• Upper Volta → Burkina Faso (1984), a name assembled from two of the country's languages, roughly "land of upright people".
• Rhodesia → Zimbabwe (1980), replacing a name honouring Cecil Rhodes with one taken from the stone city of Great Zimbabwe.
• South West Africa → Namibia (formally 1990), after the Namib Desert.

The pattern is consistent: out goes the colonial administrator or the European geographic label, in comes something drawn from a pre-colonial polity, a language, or a landscape feature.

2. A change of regime

A new government sometimes wants a new name, and the name then carries a political charge that outlasts the government.

Burma → Myanmar (1989) is the sharpest example. The renaming was carried out by a military government that had seized power the previous year, and because many opposition groups rejected its legitimacy, they kept saying Burma. Decades later the choice of word is still read as a position. This site uses Myanmar, which is the name at the United Nations.

Zaire → DR Congo (1997) ran the other way. Mobutu had renamed the country Zaire in 1971 as part of a campaign of "authenticity"; when his rule ended, the older name came back.

Kampuchea → Cambodia followed a similar arc through the 1970s and 80s, the name shifting with each change of government.

3. Settling a dispute

Two of the most recent changes were negotiated outcomes rather than unilateral decisions.

North Macedonia (2019) ended one of the longest-running naming disputes in modern diplomacy. Greece objected to its neighbour using "Macedonia" alone, arguing it implied a claim on the Greek region of the same name, and blocked its NATO and EU accession for years. The Prespa Agreement added a single word and unlocked both.

Eswatini (2018) was different in character: the king announced it on the 50th anniversary of independence, and one stated reason was that Swaziland was too often confused with Switzerland. The name was not new — eSwatini is simply the country's name in siSwati.

4. "Stop translating our name"

The subtlest category, and the one most often missed. Here the name itself does not change; what changes is the request that other languages use it as-is rather than substituting their own version.

• Côte d'Ivoire asked in 1986 that its name not be translated. English-language usage has only partly complied — this site uses Ivory Coast because that is what most English speakers search for, which is a compromise rather than a correct answer.
• Cabo Verde made the same request in 2013, retiring Cape Verde in English.
• Türkiye asked the UN in 2022 to use the Turkish spelling in all languages. Adoption is ongoing and inconsistent; the quizzes here still say Turkey, again for search reasons.
• Czechia is a slightly different case. The Czech Republic registered Czechia as its official short name in 2016 — not a replacement but a shorter alternative, the way France is short for the French Republic.

The Netherlands belongs here only loosely. In 2020 it stopped using "Holland" in official promotion, but that was a branding decision about a nickname: Holland is two provinces, not the country, and never was the country's name.

The ones people expect and do not get

A few countries have names that look like they should have changed and did not. India's constitution names it both India and Bharat, so both are already official; periodic proposals to drop the former have not been enacted. Greece calls itself Hellas at home and has never asked the world to follow. Germany answers to at least half a dozen unrelated names across Europe — Deutschland, Allemagne, Niemcy, Saksa, Tyskland — with no apparent objection to any of them.

Why it matters for a quiz

Any list of countries is a list as of a date. A geography quiz written in 2015 has Swaziland and the Czech Republic; one written in 1990 has Zaire, Burma and Upper Volta. If an answer here looks wrong to you, the most likely explanation is that you learned the map at a different moment rather than that either of us is mistaken.

The set used across this site is the current UN convention: 193 member states plus Vatican City and Palestine. If you want to see how well the modern list has actually stuck, the country quiz and the name-them-all round will find the gaps quickly.