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Where does the name 'Canada' come from?
In 1535 Jacques Cartier heard the word from Indigenous guides and it became the name of the land.
The standard account, supported by the Government of Canada, is that the name comes from 'kanata', a Huron-Iroquois word meaning village or settlement. In 1535 two young men from the Stadacona area, in the region of present-day Quebec City, told the French explorer Jacques Cartier the way to 'kanata'. Cartier used the word for the village and then for the lands ruled by its chief, Donnacona, because he had no other name for the territory.
Over the next decades the name grew. By 1547, maps used 'Canada' for everything north of the St. Lawrence River, and by the early 1700s French usage stretched across much of the interior of North America. The first official use came in 1791, when the province of Quebec was divided into Upper and Lower Canada, and the two were reunited as the Province of Canada in 1841.
When confederation was planned in the 1860s, many alternative names were proposed, including Borealia, Hochelaga and Victorialand. On 1 July 1867 the provinces became 'one Dominion under the name of Canada'. Other explanations exist, such as Spanish or Portuguese phrases, but scholars generally regard them as folk etymology. The Laurentian Iroquoian origin is treated as the best supported, though the exact source language is described with some hedging in sources.