America gets its name from Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian explorer and contemporary of Christopher Columbus. While Columbus has historically received credit for “discovering” the New World, he always believed the lands he reached were part of Asia. Vespucci, on the other hand, made his own journeys to the continent now known as South America at the end of the 1400s, and realized he had found a continent new to Europeans. He called it Mundus Novus, Latin for “New World.” In 1507, the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller created a 12-panel map based on accounts from New World explorers, relying heavily on the works of Vespucci. Waldseemüller then took a feminized version of the Latin form of Vespucci’s first name, Americus, and applied it to the area we now call South America. Later on, the term gradually came to be applied to North America as well.