Roumania, Rumania, Romania: how English spelled one country's name, year by year

Which spelling, in which year#

Each ribbon below is one source. Blue is Roumania, yellow is Rumania, red is Romania; the thickness of a colour in a year is that spelling's share of the three. In the word at the top, the O and the U are filled like a slice of the ribbon for the chosen year. The O is in Roumania and Romania, so it carries their blue and red; the U is in Roumania and Rumania, and carries blue and yellow. Where a letter is pale, that is the share of the spelling that does without it.

Choose a year with the slider or the year box, or press on a ribbon. The diamonds are dated decisions and open a short account; the bars underneath show the spelling each institution used.

In 1940 the Romanian legation in London was Romanian on its letterhead, Rumanian on the brass plate by its front door and Roumanian in the London telephone directory.[6] All three spellings were in print in English that year, and the argument between them had another fifty years to run.

The usual account is short: English borrowed Roumania from French, moved to Rumania, and after the Second World War let it fall out of use “in favour of the name used officially”, Romania, as Wikipedia's article on the name puts it[7]. Counted year by year, the change has sharper dates and more actors. Washington's names board prescribed Roumania by 1905 and Rumania by 1920. Bucharest, Romania's capital, told its own legations to write Romania in 1932. America's news agencies adopted Romania in April 1944, and their newspapers changed within a week. The British Foreign Office wrote Roumania until 1963, then took Rumania, mainly at Bucharest's request according to the British names committee's own account, and accepted Romania in 1970. The New York Times printed Rumania in its news headlines until 3 February 1990.

Here the three spellings are counted: in the books scanned by Google, British and American separately, for every year from 1859 to 2019; in a sample of American newspapers from 1862 to 1963; and in the headlines of The New York Times. Every dated ruling of a government, a names committee, a news agency or a newspaper is set on the same line of years.

The whole difference is one vowel, and the same choice between o and u runs through the country's name in other languages. Of the 278 living languages that have a name for the country in Wikidata, 131 say it with an o and 133 with a u.

The curve in brief. Roumania, modelled on French Roumanie, takes over in the 1860s and holds between 81% and 91% of the three spellings through the 1880s and 1890s, in British and American books alike. American books move to Rumania around the First World War: it leads from 1919. British books keep Roumania a generation longer; Rumania leads there for good only from 1949. Romania becomes the most common spelling in American books in 1971 and in British books in 1973.

American newspapers moved earlier than books, and less tidily. In the sample read here, where each newspaper counts once, Rumania overtakes Roumania in 1915. In April 1944 most of them went over to Romania within a week. By the late 1950s Rumania was ahead again, and the newspapers of the one state that can be followed further, Georgia, stay divided until the 1980s.

Can a spelling date a headline?#

Because the paper changed its spelling twice, at dates that can be found, the spelling in a headline is a rough date stamp. These are real headlines of The New York Times, read from the paper's own index[3]. Pick the period each was printed in.

1. “RUMANIA WEIGHS HER MIGHT” The New York Times — from 1913 to 3 February 1990. Rumania is the paper's usual spelling from 1913, and that of its news headlines until 3 February 1990. This one is from 7 January 1940.
2. “U.S. Paid Romania for Soviet Arms, Report Says” The New York Times — after 3 February 1990. The paper's news headlines have had Romania since 4 February 1990. This one is from 6 May 1990.
3. “Romania Seeks to Reduce Abortions” The New York Times — after 3 February 1990. The paper's news headlines have had Romania since 4 February 1990. This one is from 17 January 1991.
4. “Rumania Needs Long Credits” The New York Times — from 1913 to 3 February 1990. Rumania is the paper's usual spelling from 1913, and that of its news headlines until 3 February 1990. This one is from 4 January 1920.
5. “ROUMANIANS SPURN BRIBES” The New York Times — before 1913. In the days read, Roumania is the paper's usual spelling until 1911. This one is from 26 July 1892.
6. “OPPOSITION GAINS IN ROMANIA VOTE” The New York Times — after 3 February 1990. The paper's news headlines have had Romania since 4 February 1990. This one is from 25 February 1992.
7. “RUMANIAN KING VERY ILL” The New York Times — from 1913 to 3 February 1990. Rumania is the paper's usual spelling from 1913, and that of its news headlines until 3 February 1990. This one is from 10 January 1914.
8. “The Peace Conference--The Abdication of Prince Charles of Roumania Postponed” The New York Times — before 1913. In the days read, Roumania is the paper's usual spelling until 1911. This one is from 4 April 1871.
9. “RUMANIAN WOMEN SLOW” The New York Times — from 1913 to 3 February 1990. Rumania is the paper's usual spelling from 1913, and that of its news headlines until 3 February 1990. This one is from 19 January 1930.
10. “ROUMANIA'S UNQUIET TIME” The New York Times — before 1913. In the days read, Roumania is the paper's usual spelling until 1911. This one is from 27 April 1888.

Did other languages argue over the same vowel?#

Some did, each in its own decade. The same count on the French, Italian and Spanish books of Google's corpus[1] shows three more arguments about the first syllable, and one about where the stress falls. German is absent because it hardly hesitated: Rumänien has more than nine tenths of the German forms counted (Rumänien, Romänien, Rumanien) in every decade since the 1860s.

What is the country called in the world's languages today?#

Wikidata, the database behind Wikipedia, holds a name for the country under 321 language codes[4]. Setting aside constructed and historical languages and regional or script variants leaves 278 living languages. In 131 of them the first syllable has an o, as in Romanian România. In 133 it has the sound u: 114 write it with the letter u and 19 with two letters, as French does in Roumanie, Dutch in Roemenië and Greek in Ρουμανία. In 13 the script writes o and u with the same letter, and one, Navajo, describes the country instead of borrowing its name.

On the maps each point is a language, placed where Glottolog locates it[5] and coloured by that first vowel. The colours are the ones used above: red for o, yellow for u, blue for u written with two letters.

The split does not follow language families. Among the Romance languages, Italian and Portuguese have the o, French and Spanish the u. Among the Slavic languages nearly all have the u, and Slovene (Romunija) and Macedonian (Романија) the o. Korean has both: 루마니아 (Rumania) in the South and 로므니아 (Romŭnia) in the North. Chinese writes 罗马尼亚, Luómǎníyà, and its first two characters are the ones it uses for Rome, 罗马.

A dictionary states the route for only some of these names. Vasmer's etymological dictionary of Russian derives румын from Romanian român[30]. The Treccani dictionary gives Italian both romeno and rumeno, “from Romanian român or rumân, which is Latin Romanus”[31]. For most languages the table records only what the form shows, its first vowel, and makes no claim about the language it came through.

Wikidata labels are written by volunteers. A label can lag behind a language's own standard, and for small languages it often copies the English form. Spanish is listed here as Rumania; the Spanish Academy accepts both Rumania and Rumanía[32].

The older names: Wallachia, Moldavia, Transylvania#

Before there was one state with one name, foreigners had names for the lands it was later made of, and several of those names are still in use. Turkish has Eflak for Wallachia and Boğdan for Moldavia; Hungarian has Havasalföld and Polish Wołoszczyzna, both for Wallachia; English kept Wallachia, from the Germanic word for a speaker of a Romance language, the same word that gave Wales. Each has its own page, with its sources:

• The Welsh are the Wallachians of BritainWallachia, Eflak, Havasalföld, Transalpina: one Germanic word for the Romance-speaking neighbour.
• Where does the name Moldova come from, and why was it called Bogdan?Boğdan, Kara Boğdan, Bogdania: the principality named after its founder.
• Where do the names Transylvania, Erdély, Ardeal and Siebenbürgen come from?Four names for one province.
• The serf named RomanRumân and român: how the people's own name split in two, and what the u form came to mean.

How fast does English change a country's name?#

The same count for other names shows what a quick change looks like. Shares are within each pair, in all English books of the corpus[1].

Serbia overtakes Servia in English books in 1915, the second year of the First World War; Washington's names board had made the same change in its report of 1916, the one that still prescribed Roumania[10]. The British government adopted Iran for Persia in 1935 and Thailand for Siam in 1939[21]; in books Iran leads from 1942 and Thailand from 1950. Beijing leads Peking from 1981.

Romania leads Rumania in English books from 1971: 39 years after Bucharest's instruction to its legations, 27 years after the American news agencies adopted it and one year after London did. For most of that time the British committee advised Romania, the Foreign Office wrote Roumania and American books wrote Rumania.

The dated decisions, in order#

Each entry is a document that can be opened, or, where marked, Paul Woodman's account of documents not seen here.

1. by 29 November 1905

   Washington's rule: Roumania, “not Romania nor Rumania”

   The United States Board on Geographic Names, set up in 1890 to give federal maps and documents one spelling for each place, sends its third report to the President on 29 November 1905. The report lists every decision since 1890, without dates, and among them: “Roumania; country, S. Europe. (Not Romania nor Rumania.)”[9] The same list has “Bucharest; capital of Roumania” and “Servia”. In American books of 1905 Roumania has 78% of the three spellings.

2. 1911

   The Encyclopaedia Britannica files the country under Rumania

   The eleventh edition opens its article “RUMANIA, or Roumania [România], a kingdom of south-eastern Europe”[12]. In British books of that year Rumania has 14% of the three spellings.

3. between 1916 and 1920

   Washington reverses itself: Rumania, “not Romania nor Roumania”

   The Board's fourth report (1916) still prescribes Roumania[10]. The fifth, which covers decisions to 1920, has “Rumania; Kingdom, southeastern Europe. (Not Romania nor Roumania.)”, with the asterisk that marks a revised decision[11]. American books had been moving for a decade: Rumania passes Roumania there in 1919.

4. 1923 and 1926

   The British names committee advises Romania; the Foreign Office keeps Roumania

   The Permanent Committee on Geographical Names, founded in 1919 to advise the British government, recommended “România” in 1923 and “Romania”, without the circumflex, in 1926. The Foreign Office did not follow: the letters it received from the country's own legation in London were signed by the “Roumanian chargé d'affaires”. The Times had by then adopted Rumania. The account is that of Paul Woodman, of the committee, in an article of 2008[6].

5. 1932

   Bucharest tells its legations to write Romania

   According to Woodman, the Romanian government instructed its legations in Britain and the United States to follow the committee's advice of 1926. Washington complied. The legation in London asked to keep Roumania, because that was the Foreign Office's spelling: each side, it seems, believed it was deferring to the other[6]. In British books of 1932 Romania has 3% of the three spellings.

6. 8 August 1940

   The Romanian government announces the spelling Romania

   Its English-language Romanian Bulletin, quoted by Woodman, says that on the advice of the “Romanian Royal Academy of Letters” and the Royal Romanian Geographical Society “this new spelling has been adopted by the Royal Romanian Legations in London and Washington”[6]. The reason given is the British committee's ruling of 1926. Rome is not mentioned in the passage quoted.

7. 8 and 9 April 1944

   The American news agencies adopt Romania

   A dispatch of 8 April reports that the Associated Press, the United Press and the International News Service have adopted “in general” the National Geographic Society's style for foreign names, with exceptions of their own, “effective tomorrow”: “Romania instead of Rumania, Yugoslavia instead of Jugoslavia”[13]. The Pampa News of Texas, the newspaper in which the dispatch was found, prints it on page 3; the headline across its front page that day is “Reds 40 Miles Inside Rumania, Reach Czech Border”.

   In the American newspapers of the collection, Romania goes from 1.6% of the three spellings in the ninety days before 9 April to 73% in the ninety days after.

8. 10 February 1947

   The peace treaty is a Treaty of Peace with Roumania

   The treaty signed in Paris between the Allied powers and the country spells it Roumania throughout its English text, in the British edition and in the American one alike[14][15]. In British books of 1947 Roumania is again the most common of the three spellings, with 50%.

9. 16 September 1953

   At home the name becomes Romînia

   A decision of Romania's Council of Ministers replaces the letter â with î in every word, from 1 April 1954: “romîn, Romînia”[16]. The first vowel does not change, and nothing changes in English. The country joins the United Nations on 14 December 1955 as ROMANIA in the English text and ROUMANIE in the French[17].

10. November and December 1963

    London moves from Roumania to Rumania, mainly at Bucharest's request

    In November the names committee gives up Romania, which it had advised since 1926, and recognises Rumania as British usage. In December the Foreign Office abandons Roumania for Rumania, “principally on the basis of requests from the Romanian government itself which, surprisingly perhaps, favoured the spelling ‘Rumania’ for the English language at this time”[6]. In British books of 1963 the three spellings stand at Roumania 32%, Rumania 60%, Romania 8%.

11. 1964–1965

    România returns, and with it the request for Romania

    The Romanian Academy restores â in the word român and its family[16]; Scînteia, the daily of the ruling Romanian Workers' Party, goes from romîn to român between its issues of 30 April and 3 May 1965[26]. The constitution of 21 August 1965 names the state Republica Socialistă România[18]. Woodman records that Bucharest then went back on its preference for Rumania and renewed its pre-war campaign for Romania, raising the spelling when trade agreements and communiqués with Britain were signed[6].

12. January 1966 and January 1967

    Washington prefers Romania

    In the State Department's Bulletin the name appears as Rumania 62 times in the volumes for 1964 and 1965 and as Romania twice; in the volume for January to June 1966 it appears as Romania nine times and as Rumania twice[19]. The Government Printing Office's style manual of January 1967 still prints Rumania in its tables, with a footnote: “The State Department and Board on Geographic Names preference for these countries are Romania and Viet-Nam.”[20] In American books Romania has 27% of the three spellings in 1967 and 48% in 1971.

13. July and September 1970

    London adopts Romania

    The names committee advises Romania in July and the Foreign Office adopts it in September, seven years after choosing Rumania[6][21]. Woodman gives one reason, pressure from Bucharest, and a possible second: a wish to support Romania's presentation of itself as a Latin country apart from the Soviet bloc. He adds that British atlases and the American names board had already changed. In British books Romania has 31% of the three spellings in 1970 and leads from 1973.

14. 1979 and 1985

    The catalogues follow

    The United States National Library of Medicine files research under RUMANIA until 1978 and under Romania from 1979[22]. By the summer of 1985 the Library of Congress's table of country names for its cataloguers reads “Rumania see Romania”[23].

15. 4 February 1990

    The New York Times changes its headlines

    The paper reports the fall of Nicolae Ceaușescu, in December 1989, under the running heading “Upheaval in the East: Rumania”. Its last news headline with that spelling is printed on 3 February 1990; on 4 February the headline reads “Romania Council Out; Multiparty Unit Is In”[3]. Between 17 December 1989 and 3 February 1990 the paper printed 111 headlines with Rumania or Rumanian. One opinion headline of 5 February still has Rumania.

Method, limits and sources#

Books. The counts come from the Google Books Ngram exports, version 20200217 (one-word files), for the corpora English, British English and American English[1]. A spelling is counted in the forms Roumania and ROUMANIA (and likewise for the other two); lower-case forms and misread words such as “Roumnnia” are left out. A share is one spelling divided by the sum of the three in a five-year window centred on the year; counts are summed before dividing. The data are released under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence. The corpus is the set of books that libraries held and Google scanned: its mix of publishers and subjects changes from decade to decade, the text is read by machine, a book counts once for every time it prints the word, and “British” and “American” describe where a book was published. Counting books that contain a spelling at least once, in place of occurrences, moves the dates by a few years: Rumania leads in British books from 1937 by that count (1949 by occurrences), in American books from 1924 (1919); Romania leads from 1974 and 1972. For French, Italian, Spanish and German the same dataset was read through Google's viewer, which agrees with the exported files to seven decimal places on every English word tested.

Before 1859. In English books printed before the union of the two principalities, “Romania” is another word: the lands of the Eastern Roman empire, or the Latin empire set up at Constantinople in 1204. It appears about 0.40 times in a million words between 1800 and 1855, and the spelling Romania appears 0.16 times in a million between 1870 and 1900. The red of the nineteenth century is no more than that older word can account for, and the ribbons start in 1859.

Newspapers. American Stories[2] is a transcription of the newspaper pages scanned by the Library of Congress, published with one file per year and the pages in shuffled order. For each year from 1862 to 1963 the first 200 megabytes of the file were read (400 from 1924, when the files are smaller), which gives a random sample of that year's pages: 1,876,630 pages and 57,842,210 articles in all. An article counts once for each spelling it contains. For the yearly shares each newspaper counts once: its own shares over a five-year window, averaged with the others', for every newspaper with at least three matching articles. This matters after 1923, when the collection holds fewer newspapers and one of them, the Evening Star of Washington, supplies most of the matching articles. The Star printed Romania after 1944; pooled article by article, Romania would have 70% of the three spellings in 1958, and newspaper by newspaper it has 33%. The count describes the newspapers in the collection. The years 1943–1945 were read whole, 225,024 pages, to follow the change of April 1944 week by week.

Other archives. For the newspapers of Georgia[24], the Welsh newspapers[28] and the London Gazette[25] the figure is the number of pages, articles or notices that each archive's own search returns for a spelling in a year.

The New York Times. The paper's public index lists the headlines of every day since 1851[3]. Every day from 17 December 1989 to 10 March 1990 was read, every fourth day from then to mid-1993, and for 78 other years (every year from 1866 to 1886 and from 1900 to 1930, every second year from 1888 to 1898, every third from 1931 to 1988) every third day from 1 January until eight headlines with one of the spellings were found or seventy days had been read; from July 1911 to July 1912, every second day: 4,614 days and 579 headlines in all. Only headlines were read.

The world. The labels are those of the Wikidata item for Romania (Q218) on 4 October 2026[4]; coordinates come from Glottolog[5]. The first vowel was read from each form by rule for Latin, Cyrillic and Greek script and by hand for the others, with the romanisation shown in the table. An article, a prefix or a word for “country” in front of the name is set aside (Irish an Rómáin, Zulu IRomaniya, Basque Errumania, Thai Prathet Romania), and Chinese characters are read as each language reads them. Constructed languages, historical languages and regional or script variants are listed and not counted.

What is not known. The date on which Washington's names board ruled for Roumania is not given by its report, which lists all decisions from 1890 to 1905. Its move from Rumania to Romania was not found either; a Government Printing Office manual shows the preference existed by January 1967, and Woodman dates the adoption to 1969. The instruction of 1932 and the Romanian Bulletin of 1940 are known here through Woodman's article, as are the Foreign Office's reasons in 1963 and 1970; he gives no archive references. The British government's own list of country names says its usage was “principally Romania” from 1926 to 1963[21], which is the committee's advice; the treaty of 1947 and the London Gazette show Roumania in official print in those years. No document seen gives Rome as the reason for a request, and no document of The New York Times about its change of 1990 was seen: the New York Public Library's guide to the paper's Foreign Desk records lists, under Romania, “see: Style, 1990–”[29].

The shares, year by year

Share of each spelling among the three, five-year window. A dash: too few occurrences, or outside the source's years.

The data

• Books: yearly counts of the three spellings, 1800–2019, three corpora (CSV)
• American newspapers: the sample per year, 1862–1963 (CSV)
• The name of the country in every language of Wikidata, with its first vowel (CSV)

Sources

1. [1] Google Books Ngram Viewer, exports version 20200217, corpora English, British English, American English, French, German, Italian, Spanish (Creative Commons Attribution 3.0)
2. [2] Melissa Dell and others, American Stories: A Large-Scale Structured Text Dataset of Historical U.S. Newspapers (2023), from the Library of Congress's Chronicling America (CC BY 4.0)
3. [3] The New York Times, index of headlines by day (nytimes.com/sitemap), read 4 October 2026
4. [4] Wikidata, item Q218 (Romania): labels in all languages, read 4 October 2026 (CC0)
5. [5] Glottolog 5, coordinates of languages (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, CC BY 4.0)
6. [6] Paul Woodman, “The spelling of the country name ‘Romania’ in British official usage: from uncertainty to standardization”, Review of Historical Geography and Toponomastics, III, 5–6 (2008)
7. [7] Wikipedia, “Name of Romania”, read 4 October 2026
8. [8] Vasile Arvinte, “Numele poporului, al limbii și al țării locuite de români în limba franceză”, Anuarul de lingvistică și istorie literară (Iași), 1977–1978
9. [9] United States Board on Geographic Names, Third Report, 1890–1906 (Washington, 1906)
10. [10] United States Geographic Board, Fourth Report, 1890 to 1916 (Washington, 1916)
11. [11] United States Geographic Board, Fifth Report, 1890 to 1920 (Washington, 1921)
12. [12] Encyclopaedia Britannica, eleventh edition (1911), vol. 23, “Rumania” (transcription on Wikisource)
13. [13] “News Services Adopt Uniform Spellings on Foreign Names”, Associated Press, in The Pampa News (Pampa, Texas), 9 April 1944, p. 3 (Texas Tech University, Southwest Collection)
14. [14] Treaty of Peace with Roumania, Paris, 10 February 1947, United Kingdom Treaty Series No. 55 (1948), Cmd. 7486
15. [15] Treaty of peace with Roumania, 10 February 1947, United States Statutes at Large, vol. 61, p. 1757
16. [16] Hotărârea Consiliului de Miniștri nr. 3135 of 16 September 1953 and the Academy's decisions of 1964–1965, reproduced in Reforme ortografice (Iași County Library)
17. [17] United Nations Treaty Series, vol. 223, No. 3052: Romania, declaration of acceptance of the obligations of the Charter, 14 December 1955
18. [18] Constitution of the Socialist Republic of Romania, 21 August 1965 (Portal legislativ)
19. [19] Department of State Bulletin, vols 50–54 (1964 to June 1966), text on the Internet Archive; “the Governments and peoples of Romania and Poland”, 10 January 1966, p. 61
20. [20] United States Government Printing Office, Style Manual (abridged), revised edition, January 1967
21. [21] UK government, Timeline of country name changes in HMG use, 1919 to present
22. [22] US National Library of Medicine, Medical Subject Headings, descriptor Romania (D012383): history note “was RUMANIA 1963–78”
23. [23] Library of Congress, Cataloging Service Bulletin No. 29, Summer 1985
24. [24] Digital Library of Georgia, Georgia Historic Newspapers: number of pages per year containing each spelling, 1866–1995, searched 4 October 2026
25. [25] The London Gazette: number of notices per year containing each spelling, 1915–1980, searched 4 October 2026
26. [26] Scînteia, No. 6605 (30 April 1965) and No. 6607 (3 May 1965), scanned by the Hunedoara-Deva County Library; issue 6606 is missing from the collection
27. [27] Jean-Alexandre Vaillant, Grammaire roumâne à l'usage des Français (Bucharest, 1840), copy of the Central University Library, Cluj
28. [28] National Library of Wales, Welsh Newspapers Online: number of articles per year containing each spelling, searched 4 October 2026
29. [29] The New York Public Library, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Times Company Records: Foreign Desk Records, 1948–1993 (finding aid)
30. [30] Max Vasmer, Этимологический словарь русского языка, entry “румын”
31. [31] Vocabolario Treccani, entry “romeno”
32. [32] Real Academia Española, Diccionario panhispánico de dudas, entry “Rumanía”

Related pages#

• Romania in China's People's DailyThe country counted in another paper: 80 years of the Chinese Communist Party's daily.
• Who says it like you? One word in 107 languagesA map of words across Europe and Asia, with the test that keeps sound-alikes apart.
• Britain and Romania: nearly 2,000 years of linksThe two countries, from Roman Dacia to today.