Formosa, Taiwan, weight of names

Taiwan heads to the polls next month for local elections. Beneath the campaign ads lies a deeper question: What do we call this place and who gets to decide?

In the pages of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), that question has been playing out across three centuries. The entries for “Formosa” and “Taiwan” chart an island’s journey from colonial fantasy to self-named reality.

Names are rarely neutral; they are the first act of possession. Nowhere is this more evident than in the OED, where the two entries serve as a linguistic seismograph for one of the world’s most enduring geopolitical fault lines. To read their historical quotations is to watch an island shed the skin of colonial romance and assume the complex, contested identity of a modern nation.

“Formosa” entered the English lexicon not as a place, but as a compliment. In the 1382 Wycliffite Bible, the term appears in the Latin phrase formosa mea (“my beautiful one”), a purely adjectival endearment. Centuries passed before the adjective hardened into a proper noun and when it finally did, it was through the ledger books of the empire.

By 1704, European trading manifests listed “sugar of Formosa” alongside “Japanese silver” and “China tea.” The West knew the island not as a society, but as a commodity. Even its natural endowments were inventoried for extraction: an 1889 entry priced Formosa camphor in the Hong Kong market, while a 1921 botanical report appraised the “crapy appearance” of Formosa oolong teas.

For 300 years, the island existed in the English language as a picturesque backdrop for trade, its indigenous inhabitants reduced to curiosities who made “a drink as strong and intoxicative as sack, out of rice.”

The lexicon shifted violently in the mid-20th century. After 1949, “Formosa” ceased to be a botanical footnote and became a Cold War battleground. The OED’s quotations from that era read like dispatches from the front lines of containment.

A 1950 Baltimore Sun article framed the island as “the last refuge of the Nationalists,” and a 1959 Economist piece tallied “United States aero-naval strength in the Formosa Strait.”

The name had become a geopolitical signifier, a synonym for the free world’s precarious foothold in Asia. Yet even as US admirals drew battle lines, the island’s own identity was quietly evolving.

The dictionary records the moment of transition with telling brevity. A 1972 entry in the Shooting Times carries the parenthetical “Taiwan to most, these days,” an author’s aside that the OED preserved, and one that quietly concedes the old colonial name was becoming an anachronism.

That was not merely a semantic shift; it was a reclamation. In that single parenthetical note, the dictionary captured the slow erosion of imperial nomenclature and the stubborn persistence of local identity.

The “Taiwan” entry, spanning 1958 to 2019, charts the emergence of a sovereign actor. Early citations still bear the scars of diplomatic isolation. A 1979 Time article lamented “disgruntlement and protest over derecognition,” but the quotations quickly pivoted to agency. Taiwan was no longer a refuge or a strait; it was a “silicon island,” an “Asian wunderkind” that “out-traded” its neighbors.

A 1976 Newsweek piece captured a peculiar moment of cultural victory, noting the embarrassment of US teams outslugged by Taiwan’s little league players, baseball being, after all, “as American as apple pie.” By 2000, the New York Times could describe a government committed to making Taiwan a “green silicon island,” a vision of technological sovereignty that would have been unintelligible to the camphor merchants of 1889.

Yet the OED also records the persistent friction of this self-naming. The newest source in its files is no longer a newspaper, but a tweet. A 2019 user observed: “If I were located in the U.S., I would likely be labeled a sinophobe because of my support for Taiwan,” proof that the name remains a political act, dangerous even in digital discourse.

The island’s identity is still negotiated in the space between Beijing’s sovereignty claims and Washington’s strategic ambiguity.

Even the word “Taiwanese” carries weight. In 1969, the Times noted that “63 percent of local government officials are natives of Taiwan,” a statistic that was then, and remains now, anything but neutral.

What the dictionary cannot resolve is the tension between the two names. “Formosa” carries the burden of the external gaze, colonial, romantic, reductive. It is the name given by sailors and merchants who saw beauty and profit, but not people. “Taiwan” is the name claimed by those who lived there, a word that encompasses baseball teams and semiconductor fabs, democratic protests and diplomatic slights.

The OED, in its admirable neutrality, simply records both. It offers no judgement on which name is correct, only evidence of how language bends under the pressure of history.

The dictionary, in the end, is not an arbiter of identity, but a mirror. It shows us that names are never merely descriptive; they are arguments dressed as labels. Formosa speaks of the colonial gaze; Taiwan speaks of a people’s insistence on being called by their own name. The dictionary’s record does not settle the matter. It merely acknowledges that Taiwan’s name, like its history, refuses to stand still.

For this nation, caught between history’s long shadow and the urgencies of the present, the argument is far from over.

Hugo Tseng has a doctorate in linguistics, and is a lexicographer and former chair of the Soochow University English Department.