Columbus sighted the island he named Dominica on a Sunday, 3 November 1493. The name comes from the Latin word for Sunday, dies Dominica, reflecting the day recorded for the sighting.
The encounter occurred during Columbus’s second voyage across the Atlantic, not his famous first voyage of 1492. His fleet was exploring the Lesser Antilles while searching for new territories and a route toward the Asian lands he still believed lay nearby.
Dominica was already inhabited by Indigenous peoples, including Kalinago communities. Columbus’s naming convention reflected a common European practice of assigning Christian or calendar-based names to places encountered during exploration. The island’s Indigenous name, Wai’tu kubuli, is often translated as “tall is her body.”
A common mix-up is confusing Dominica with the Dominican Republic. Dominica is a mountainous island nation in the Lesser Antilles, whereas the Dominican Republic occupies the eastern part of Hispaniola. Dominica later became a French and then British colony before gaining independence in 1978.