Ever wondered how England got its name? As with countless other countries, it's all down to a tribe of early settlers (in this case, the 5th Century Angles).

In fact, almost every country in the world is named after one of four things: 1) a tribe; 2) a feature of the land; 3) a directional description; or 4) an important person. That's according to Quartz, which analyzed 195 countries listed in the Oxford Concise Dictionary of World Place-Names.

1. Tribe names

England is in good company with the lion’s share (about a third) of the world’s countries named after an early tribe or ethnic group.

• FRANCE – Named after the Franks, who conquered the land in the Medieval ages.
• VIETNAM – Named after the Viets of the South.
• THAILAND – Relates to the “tai” people, an ethnic group from the central plains region.

2. Important people

• PHILIPPINES – Named by Spanish explorer Ruy López de Villalobos, in honor of King Philip II of Spain in 1542.

3. Land features

• ICELAND – This moniker translates to "Land of Ice," perhaps for obvious reasons, from the ancient language of Old Norse. It is said to have been named by Norwegian Viking Hrafna-Flóki Vilgerðarson in 856 AD.
• HAITI – This Caribbean country’s name translates to "mountainous land" in its indigenous Taíno language. It was colonized by Spain in 1492 and later renamed “Haiti” in 1804 by former slave and revolutionary Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who declared himself emperor and took back the land.
• BARBADOS – This name translates to ‘the bearded’ in Portuguese, which is thought to be due to the long hanging roots of the fig trees that were noticed and marveled at by colonizers in the late 16th Century.

4. Location

• AUSTRALIA – First coined by the Ancient Greeks, Australia translates to “Unknown Southern Land,” but was officially declared by this name in the early 1800s by English cartographer Matthew Flinders.
• NORWAY – This country traces its name to the Old English term for “northern way,” first mentioned in 880 by the Anglo-Saxons.
• JAPAN – Nippon, which is the name commonly used by Japanese natives, means “land of the rising sun,” referring to its geographical location.

There do exist a small number of countries with quirky and imaginative names:

• Bhutan, which calls itself Druk Yul, means "land of the thunder dragon" on account of the magnificent storms that tear through the Himalayas.
• Nepal, one theory of the origin of its name makes reference to Kathmandu's sheep-rearing history, given that in Tibetan, "ne" means "home" and "pal" means "wool" - thus "the home of wool."
• Nauru, one of the world's most remote islands and the smallest state in the South Pacific, might take its name from the native term "anáoero," meaning "I go to the beach."