Etymology

Etymology



The word Malaysia is visible on a 1914 map from an American atlas.
The name "Malaysia" was adopted in 1963 when the Federation of Malaya, Singapore, North Borneo and Sarawak formed a 14-state federation.[9] However the name itself had been vaguely used to refer to areas in Southeast Asia prior to that. A map published in 1914 in Chicago has the word Malaysia printed on it referring to certain territories within the Malay Archipelago.[24] The Philippines once contemplated naming their state "Malaysia", but Malaysia adopted the name first in 1963 before the Philippines could act further on the matter.[25] Other names were contemplated for the 1963 federation. Among them was Langkasuka (Langkasuka was an old kingdom located at the upper section of the Malay Peninsula in the first millennium of the common era).[26]
Even further back into history, the English ethnologist George Samuel Windsor Earl in volume IV of Journal of the Indian Archipelago and Eastern Asia in 1850 proposed to name the islands of Indonesia as Melayunesia or Indunesia though he favored the former.[27]