Whether America is one continent or two depends on your language
English speakers since the 1950s usually count North and South America as two continents. In Spanish and Portuguese, América is one, and an americano can be anyone from Alaska to Patagonia. The name itself first appeared on a 1507 map, and a rival Bristol origin story does not hold up.
Taken together, North and South America form the second-largest continent after Asia and rank third in population. With their islands they cover about 8% of Earth's surface and 28.4% of its land, stretching some 14,000 km from Arctic tundra in Canada, Greenland and Alaska to tropical rainforest in Central and South America. The American Cordillera runs down the whole western edge, while the flatter east drains through giant basins such as the Amazon, Mississippi, La Plata and the St. Lawrence–Great Lakes system.
People first crossed over from Asia roughly 20,000 to 16,000 years ago, followed later by Na-Dene speakers, and the Inuit moved into the Arctic around 3500 BCE. Norse settlements in Greenland, and perhaps on the mainland, were eventually abandoned. Columbus's voyages between 1492 and 1504 opened lasting contact with the Old World, bringing conquest, enslavement and diseases that devastated Indigenous peoples, followed by mass European migration and the forced import of enslaved Africans. Decolonisation ran from the American Revolution in the 1770s to the Spanish–American War in the late 1890s, leaving Christianity and Spanish, English, Portuguese and French widespread.
The name debuted on Martin Waldseemüller's world map of 1507 and in a companion text probably written by Matthias Ringmann, first for South America; Gerardus Mercator stretched it over both continents in 1538. It is generally traced to the explorer Amerigo Vespucci, given a feminine ending to match Asia, Africa and Europa. In 1908 antiquarian Alfred Hudd proposed instead the Bristol merchant Richard Amerike, supposedly a backer of John Cabot's 1497 voyage, but no evidence links him to Cabot's ship.
Usage still splits. In English, American mostly means the United States, and many Canadians dislike being lumped in. Spanish speakers call US citizens estadounidense rather than americano, Portuguese has similar options, and the Olympic movement keeps a single continental association for America. More than a billion people live across the hemisphere, two-thirds of them in the United States, Brazil and Mexico, including eight metropolitan areas above 10 million, led by Mexico City and São Paulo at about 21.2 million each.
Source: Americas
