In which century did Earth's southernmost continent officially get its name "Antarctica"?
The long-imagined (but undiscovered) south polar continent was originally called Terra Australis, sometimes shortened to Australia as seen in a woodcut illustration titled "Sphere of the winds", contained in an astrological textbook published in Frankfurt in 1545.
In the early 19th century, the colonial authorities in Sydney removed the Dutch name from New Holland. Instead of inventing a new name to replace it, they took the name Australia, leaving the south polar continent nameless for some eighty years. During that period, geographers had to make do with clumsy phrases such as "the Antarctic Continent". They searched for a more poetic replacement, suggesting various names such as Ultima and Antipodea. Eventually Antarctica was adopted as the continental name in the 1890s—the first use of the name is attributed to the Scottish cartographer John George Bartholomew.
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