The earliest known usage of the name Ukraine ( , , ; ) appears in the Hypatian Codex of 1425 under the year 1187 in reference to a part of the territory of Kievan Rus'. The use of "the Ukraine" has been officially rejected by the Ukrainian government and many English-language media publications.
Ukraine is the official full name of the country, as stated in its declaration of independence and its constitution; there is no official alternative long name. From 1922 until 1991, Ukraine was the informal name of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic within the Soviet Union (annexed by Germany as during 1941–1944). After the Russian Revolution in 1917–1921, there were the short-lived Ukrainian People's Republic and Ukrainian State, recognized in early 1918 as consisting of nine governorates of the former Russian Empire (without Taurida's Crimean Peninsula), plus Chelm and the southern part of Grodno Governorate.
Etymology
Although the exact meaning of the word ukraïna or ukrajina as a whole is disputed, there is agreement that is derived from the Proto-Indo-European root , meaning 'to cut', with 'edge' as a secondary meaning. The Proto-Slavic word generally meant 'edge', related to the verb 'to cut (out)', in the sense of 'division', either 'at the edge, division line', or 'a division, region'. In Old Church Slavonic, has been attested with the meanings of 'edge, end, shore', while Church Slavonic (), () could mean 'the land someone carved out for themselves' according to Hryhoriy Pivtorak (2001). Derivatives in modern Slavic languages include variations of or in a wide array of senses, such as 'edge, country, land, end, region, bank, shore, side, rim, piece (of wood), area'.
Originally, the word (), from which the proper noun has been derived, formed in particular from the root () and the prefix that later merged with the root due to metanalysis.
The ambiguity occurs due to the polysemous nature of the root край, as it may mean either 'a boundary/edge of a certain area' or 'an area defined by certain boundaries', nevertheless both meanings allow for the formation of a valid toponym. For instance, the country name is a composition of 'Danish' + 'boundary'.
History Kievan Chronicle (Hypatian Codex) 1187 and 1189 The oldest recorded mention of the word is found in the Kievan Chronicle under the year 1187, as preserved in the Hypatian Codex written in an Old East Slavic variety of Church Slavonic. The passage narrates the death of , prince of Pereyaslavl' ():
In context, Ukraina referred to the territory of the Principality of Pereyaslavl, which was located between Kievan Rus' heartland in the Middle Dnieper region to the west, and the Pontic–Caspian steppe to the southeast, which the Rus' chronicles customarily referred to as "the land of the Polovtsi". Ukraine came to mean 'steppe frontier' or 'steppe borderland' in the Ukrainian, Polish and Russian languages thereafter.
The next mention of in the same Kievan Chronicle occurs 1189, which narrates how a certain Rostislav Berladnichich was invited by some, but not all, "men of Galich" (modern Halych), to take power in the Principality of Galicia:
Serhii Plokhy (2015, 2021) connected the 1189 mention to that of 1187, stating that both referred to the same region: "1187–1189 A Kyivan chronicler first uses the word Ukraine to describe the steppe borderland from Pereiaslav in the east to Galicia in the west."
Late Middle Ages The Kievan Chronicle and subsequent Galician–Volhynian Chronicle in the Hypatian Codex mention ukraina again under the years 1189, 1213, 1280, and in 1282, where it is applied in various contexts. In these decades, and the following centuries until the end of the Middle Ages, this term was applied to fortified borderlands of different principalities of Rus' without a specific geographic fixation: Halych-Volhynia, the (Western) Buh region, Pskov, Polatsk, Ryazan etc. According to Serhii Plokhy (2006), "the Muscovites referred to their steppe borderland as 'Ukraine', while reserving different names for areas bordering on the settled territories of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Kingdom of Poland".
Early modern cartography
The Radziwiłł map of 1613 (formal title ; originally published in 1603) was the first map to indicate the terms "Ukraine" and "Cossacks". They were used to indicate a region around Kijów. In the mid-17th century, Franco-Polish cartographer Guillaume Le Vasseur de Beauplan, who had spent the 1630s as a military engineer and architect designing and building fortifications in the region, played a significant role in popularising Ukraine as a name and a concept to a broader Western European audience, both through his maps and his writings. His 1648 General Map of Ukraine was titled in Latin ("General Map of the Wild Fields, in common speech Ukraine. With adjacent Provinces"), thereby 'using the term "Ukraine" to denote all the provinces of the Kingdom of Poland that bordered on the uninhabited steppe areas ()'. Beauplan's French-language publication of the second edition of the Description of Ukraine (, the first edition dates from 1651) defined Ukraine as "several provinces of the Kingdom of Poland lying between the borders of Muscovy and the frontiers of Transylvania". This book became wildly popular in Western Europe, and was translated into Latin, Dutch, Spanish and English in the 1660s to 1680s, and reprinted numerous times throughout the rest of the 17th century and the entire 18th century. On another map, published in Amsterdam in 1645, the sparsely inhabited region to the north of the Azov sea is called Okraina and is characterized to the proximity to the Dikoye pole (Wild Fields), posing a constant threat of raids of Turkic nomads (Crimean Tatars and the Nogai Horde).
Early modern Slavonic texts
By the 17th century, Ukraine was sometimes used to define various other, non-steppe borderlands, but the word received more commonly-used and eventually fixed meanings in the second half of the 17th century. After the south-western lands of former Rus' were subordinated to the Polish Crown in 1569, the territory from eastern Podillia to Zaporizhia got the unofficial name Ukraina due to its border function to the nomadic Tatar world in the south.Украина // Энциклопедический словарь Брокгауза и Ефрона: В 86 томах (82 т. и 4 доп.). — СПб., 1890—1907. A 1580 royal decree by Stefan Batory 'made mention of Ruthenian, Kyivan, Volhynian, Podolian, and Bratslavian Ukraine'. The Polish chronicler (died 1672), who wrote about the Khmelnytsky Uprising in 1660, explained the word Ukraina as the land located at the edge of the Polish kingdom. Thus, in the course of the 16th–18th centuries Ukraine became a concrete regional name among other historic regions such as Podillia, Severia, or Volhynia. It was used for the middle Dnieper River territory controlled by the Cossacks. The people of Ukraina were called Ukrainians (, or ).Русина О. В. Україна під татарами і Литвою. — Київ: Видавничий дім «Альтернативи», 1998. — С. 278.
Later, the term Ukraine was used for the Cossack Hetmanate lands on both sides of the Dnieper, although it didn't become the official name of the state. Nevertheless, in diplomatic correspondence between the Zaporozhian Host and the tsar of Muscovy, Cossack officials increasingly used the term "Ukraine" to denote the Cossack Hetmanate ever since Bohdan Khmelnytsky's leadership. A May 1660 set of negotiation instructions written by hetman Yurii Khmelnytsky defined "Ukraine" as the territory controlled by the Cossack state according to the Treaty of Zboriv (1649), thus making it a political rather than geographic term. The scope of this Cossack political concept of Ukraine was remarkably different from that popularised by Beauplan (who was influenced by Polish traditions) around the same time; Beauplan's was first and foremost a set of voivodeships controlled by the Kingdom of Poland, characterised by their juxtaposition to the steppes as opposed to the rest of Poland.
The Cossack Hetmanate of the Right Bank was called the "Ukrainian State" () in the 1672 Treaty of Buchach between the Ottoman Empire and Poland.Adam Naruszewicz. Naruszewicz folder. "Akta historyczne 1669-1673", no 56. Manuscript. Archive of the Czartoryski Library. Ca. 1781–1792. P. 431 [p. 5]. The Ottomans used the term "Country of Ukraine" ().Kármán, Gábor, and Lovro Kunčević. The European Tributary States of the Ottoman Empire in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. BRILL, 2013. P. 145.
Modern period From the 18th century on, Ukraine became known in the Russian Empire by the geographic term Little Russia. In the 1830s, Mykola Kostomarov and his Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius in Kyiv started to use the name Ukrainians. It was also taken up by Volodymyr Antonovych and the Khlopomany ('peasant-lovers'), former Polish gentry in Eastern Ukraine, and later by the Ukrainophiles in Halychyna, including Ivan Franko. The evolution of the meaning became particularly obvious at the end of the 19th century. The term is also mentioned by the Russian scientist and traveler of Ukrainian origin Nicholas Miklouho-Maclay (1846–1888). At the turn of the 20th century the term Ukraine became independent and self-sufficient, pushing aside regional self-definitions. In the course of the political struggle between the Little Russian and the Ukrainian identities, it challenged the traditional term Little Russia () and ultimately defeated it in the 1920s during the Bolshevik policy of Korenization and Ukrainization.Миллер, Алексей Ильич (Miller, Aleksey Ilyich), Дуализм идентичностей на Украине // Отечественные записки. — № 34 (1) 2007. С. 84-96Martin T. The Affirmative Action Empire. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2001
Interpretation Interpretation as "borderland"
Since the first known usage in 1187, and almost until the 18th century, in written sources, this word was used in the meaning of "border lands", without reference to any particular region with clear borders, including far beyond the territory of modern Ukraine. The generally accepted and frequently used meaning of the word as "borderland" has increasingly been challenged by revision, motivated by self-asserting of identity.
The etymology of the word Ukraine is seen this way in most etymological dictionaries, such as Max Vasmer's etymological dictionary of Russian; Orest Subtelny,Orest Subtelny. Ukraine: A History. University of Toronto Press, 1988 Paul Magocsi,A History of Ukraine. University of Toronto Press, 1996 Omeljan Pritsak,From Kyïvan Rus' to modern Ukraine: Formation of the Ukrainian nation (with Mykhailo Hrushevski and John Stephen Reshetar). Cambridge, Massachusetts: Ukrainian Studies Fund, Harvard University, 1984. Mykhailo Hrushevskyi,Грушевський М. Історія України-Руси. Том II. Розділ V. Стор. 4 Ivan Ohiyenko, Petro TolochkoТолочко П. П. «От Руси к Украине» («Від Русі до України». 1997 and others. It is supported by Jaroslav Rudnyckyj in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine and the Etymological dictionary of the Ukrainian language (based on that of Vasmer).Етимологічний словник української мови: У 7 т. / Редкол. О. С. Мельничук (голов. ред.) та ін. — К.: Наук. думка, 1983 — Т. 6: У — Я / Уклад.: Г. П. Півторак та ін. — 2012. — 568 с. .
Interpretation as "region, country"
Ukrainian scholars and specialists in Ukrainian and Slavic philology have interpreted the term ukraina in the sense of "region, principality, country",Шелухін, С. Україна — назва нашої землі з найдавніших часів. Прага, 1936. Андрусяк, М. Назва «Україна»: «країна» чи «окраїна». Прага, 1941; Історія козаччини, кн. 1—3. Мюнхен. Ф. Шевченко: термін "Україна", "Вкраїна" має передусім значення "край", "країна", а не "окраїна": том 1, с. 189 в Історія Української РСР: У 8 т., 10 кн. — К., 1979. "province", or "the land around" or "the land pertaining to" a given centre.