The nation of Vanuatu is an archipelago of about 80 islands located in the South Pacific Ocean, around 150 miles north of New Zealand. In 1774, Captain James Cook mapped the island group and named it New Hebrides, after the Hebrides islands off the coast of Scotland. In 1977, the islands declared their independence, and three years later, the islands returned to their original name: Vanuatu.

Situated on the outskirts of Columbus, this suburb shares a name with the capital of Ireland. One of the area’s earliest settlers, John Sells, established a village in the area in 1810. He asked his land surveyor, John Shields, to come up with a better name than “Sells Settlement.” Shields chose to name it after his birthplace — Dublin, Ireland.

A businessman from Toronto, Ontario, W. F. Dunsbaugh was working in this part of Ohio in the 1880s when the city on the shores of the Ohio River was named in his honor. Whether it was his own suggestion, or the citizens came up with the idea, is unclear, but it certainly seemed that Toronto, Canada, was, “a place worth emulating,” according to locals at the time.

One of Canada’s three maritime provinces, the territory of New Brunswick was founded in 1784 by King George III, who carved the territory from Nova Scotia and named it after his duchy, the German county of Brunswick. New Brunswick is Canada’s only official bilingual province, with both English and French granted equal status under provincial law. (Quebec is the only Canadian province where French is the sole official language.)

You could actually consider the small town of Glasgow, Montana, “the middle of nowhere.” Situated near the Canadian border and home to just over 3,000 people, it’s the most isolated town in the contiguous U.S. Glasgow’s name has an interesting history, too: It was simply chosen at random by a railway clerk who spun a globe and landed on Glasgow, Scotland’s largest city.

In 1995, Paris, Texas — named after the City of Light — built a 60-foot-tall replica of the famous Parisian landmark. In a friendly rivalry, the town of Paris, Tennessee, built their own five feet taller for good measure. In response, the Texas town added a 10-foot-tall metal cowboy hat on top of their Eiffel Tower replica to outdo the similarly named city.

Caledonia was the Roman name for a historical region located north of the Roman frontier that roughly corresponds to modern-day Scotland. New Caledonia, meanwhile, is an island group in the South Pacific that is now a French overseas territory. The largest island, also called New Caledonia, was named by Captain Cook in 1774, as it reminded him of his native Scotland.

New Britain and New Ireland are part of the Bismarck Archipelago of Papua New Guinea, found in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. New Britain was named by the English explorer William Dampier in 1700. New Ireland lies just north of New Britain, and was named by British explorer Philip Carteret in 1767. Since Papua New Guinea’s independence in 1975, both islands belong to that nation.

Like its European counterpart, Athens, Georgia, is a center of academia, culture, and the arts. The University of Georgia — the first public land-grant university in the U.S. — was founded here in 1785. The city was incorporated in 1806, and the Georgian governor at the time, John Milledge, suggested the name Athens, as the Greek capital was home to Europe’s earliest intellectuals, including revered philosophers Plato and Aristotle.

Memphis was the ancient capital of Egypt because of its prominent location on the Nile River Delta. Its American counterpart is also located on the delta of an important river — the Mississippi, which was sometimes referred to as “the American Nile.” Before he was President, general Andrew Jackson was one of the three people who founded the city in 1819 and coined the name based on its geography.

Montpellier is one of France's largest cities and most important cultural centers, while the Vermont city sits at the confluence of the Winooski and North Branch Rivers in the Green Mountains. The founder of Montpelier, Vermont, Colonel Jacob Davis, named it after the French city when he settled there in 1787.

Venezuela was named by Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci during his 1499 tour of South America. When Vespucci encountered Indigenous tribes who built huts on stilts as protection against flooding, it reminded him of the similarly constructed Venetian homes in his home country. This led him to name the area "Venezuela," or "Little Venice."

There are several countries with “Guinea” in their names, deriving from the European name for the region and peoples of West Africa. Spanning more than 300,000 square miles in the western Pacific Ocean to the north of Australia, New Guinea is the second-largest island in the world. Its name comes from early Spanish explorers, who were thought the island’s Indigenous population bore resemblance to the peoples of West Africa.

Nova Scotia’s name comes from the Latin words for “New Scotland.” Canada’s second-smallest province was named in 1621, when King James IV of Scotland granted the land to Sir William Alexander, who chose to honor his home country. The province soon received an influx of settlers from Scotland, who are responsible for its strong Gaelic and Celtic heritage that remains to this day.

When the Dutch first arrived to the country and continent now known as Australia, they called it New Holland. The continent was claimed as a British territory in 1770, and when English explorer Matthew Flinders circumnavigated the continent in 1803, he proposed changing the name to Australia, which eventually stuck.

It’s not the geographical similarities that led to this city in Florida being named after the Melbourne Down Under. The area around the Indian River Lagoon began rapidly developing in the late 19th century, and a post office became necessary to serve the community. In 1888, the settlement needed a name. The area’s inhabitants found inspiration in the town’s first postmaster, Cornthwaite John Hector, who had spent many of his formative years in Melbourne, Australia.

Modern-day New Jersey was known as New Netherland in the 17th century. When the Dutch lost control of the colony in 1664, it went to two British proprietors: Sir George Carteret and Lord John Berkley. Carteret was formerly the governor of the isle of Jersey, a self-governing British crown dependency in the English Channel, so he renamed the land New Jersey.

The small city of Valparaiso in northwest Indiana was originally named Portersville in honor of Commodore David Porter of the U.S. Navy. After Porter commanded a warship in a famous battle in the harbor of Valparaiso, Chile, he was seen as a war hero, and the town of Portersville was renamed after the Chilean city.

As one of the first cities built by English settlers in the U.S., it’s no surprise that Boston’s name comes from a town in England. Established in 1630, just a decade after the Plymouth colony (a name itself taken from the Cornish port the Puritan settlers had departed) was founded, this Massachusetts city was named for Boston, Lincolnshire. Many of the colony’s most prominent early citizens hailed from the English cathedral town.

Dutch explorer Abel Tasman was the first European to encounter New Zealand in 1642. Dutch cartographers called the land Nova Zeelandia (sea-land) in honor of a province in the Netherlands. After Captain Cook arrived in 1769, the Dutch name was later anglicized to New Zealand, and has remained ever since.