america
English
Alternative forms
*(North and South America)
*(the United States of America) (humourous) (sometimes derogatory)
Proper noun
(
Americas)
The continents of North and South America, especially when considered to form a single continent; the Americas
* 2009 , (Diarmaid MacCulloch), A History of Christianity (Penguin 2010), page 691:
- Franciscan attitudes in the Canaries offered possible precedents for what Europe now came to call ‘the New World’, or, through a somewhat tangled chain of circumstances, ‘America ’.
The United States of America.
* {{quote-magazine, title=No hiding place
, date=2013-05-25, volume=407, issue=8837, page=74, magazine=(
The Economist)
citation
, passage=In
America alone, people spent $170 billion on “direct marketing”—junk mail of both the physical and electronic varieties—last year. Yet of those who received unsolicited adverts through the post, only 3% bought anything as a result.}}
Usage notes
Residents of the United States of America may refer to their country as the "United States" (more formal), "America" (common and often patriotic), "the U.S.A.", or simply "the States" (informal). Residents of Alaska, United States of America's northernmost state, refer to mainland America as "the " (informal).
Residents of the United Kingdom typically refer to the United States of America as "America". Residents of Canada less frequently refer to the United States of America as "America", referring otherwise to "the United States" (more formal), "the U.S." (common), or simply "the States" (informal). Peoples from Latin American countries usually use "America" to mean the whole continent; they rarely use the term "Americas" which is mostly used in the United States.
The plural form "the Americas" is common when referring to North and South America together, to avoid ambiguity. Seen as a single continent, it is commonly "the continent of America".
Quotations
* 1922 , (James Joyce), , II.402:
*: Thou sawest thy America , thy lifetask, and didst charge to cover like the transpontine bison.
Synonyms
* (North and South America) Americas
* (United States of America) see
See also
*
