Why do we call the African continent “Africa”?
The origins of the name “Africa” date back to the Ancient World and can be explained by several versions.
One theory is that it was named for a native tribe there—the Afri, with “Africa” then being the feminine form of “Africus”, literally meaning “land of the Afri”.
An alternate theory is that Africa comes from the Phoenician word “afar”, which means “dust”, put together with the Latin suffix –ica. So the name could mean “a land of dust.”
According to a third version the Arabic afar meant “earth” itself and was used by Romans who called their new province “Africa”, which was only a small part of the whole continent.
As Europeans continued exploring and discovered the breadth of the continent, the name that the Romans had originally used for their small province stuck, and the entire continent became known as Africa.
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