New World

The New World is an early modern European term for most of the lands of the Western Hemisphere, above all the Americas, and sometimes Oceania. It entered use in the early sixteenth century, during Europe's Age of Discovery, through the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci and his pamphlet Mundus novus. Vespucci argued that the lands reached by sailing west across the Atlantic were new continents rather than the outer edge of Asia, and those lands were soon named America after him. The realization widened the picture European geographers had held of a world made only of Africa, Asia and Europe, which together became known as the Old World. The phrase therefore marks a moment in the history of geographic knowledge as much as a place on the map.