The use of the term “Aotearoa New Zealand” is one of those signs that help separate the greenstone-wearers from the red-white-and-blue crowd. The name “Aotearoa New Zealand” has been pushed into use by the bone-pendant brigade..

The name “New Zealand” goes back to 1645 when Dutch cartographers renamed the land “Nova Zeelandia” after the Dutch province of Zeeland. The Dutch explorer Abel Tasman who sighted New Zealand in 1642 called it “Staten Landt”.

British explorer James Cook anglicised the name to “New Zealand” when he mapped the coastline in 1769. The name “New Zealand” appears in the English version of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi and was transliterated into Te Tiriti, the Maori text, as “Nu Tirani”.

It is unknown whether Maori had a name for the whole country before the arrival of Europeans. The name “Aotearoa” originally referred to just the North Island.

The first documented use of the word “Aotearoa” was in New Zealand Governor George Grey’s book titled Polynesian Mythology And Ancient Traditional History Of The New Zealand Race, published in 1855.