Etymology

The Netherlands in its entirety is often referred to by the much older designation "Holland" (meaning holt land, or wood land), though this refers only to North and South Holland, two of the nation's twelve provinces, formerly a single province and earlier the County of Holland. This originally Frankish county emerged from the dissolved Frisian Kingdom and was – after the decline of Duchy of Brabant and County of Flanders – economically and politically the most important county in the Low Countries region. Because of this importance, and the emphasis on Holland during the formation of the Dutch Republic, the Eighty Years' War and later the Anglo-Dutch Wars in the 16th, 17th and 18th century, Holland served as a pars pro toto for the entire country, and is nowadays considered either incorrect,^[19][20] informal,^[21] or on occasion opprobrious, depending on the context, but is widely used when referring to the national football team.^[22]
The "region" called Low Countries (comprising Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg) and the "country" of the Netherlands have the same toponymy. Place names with Neder (or lage), Nieder, Nether (or low) and Nedre (in Germanic languages) and Bas or Inferior (in Romance languages) are in use in places all over Europe. They are sometimes used in a deictic relation to a higher ground that consecutively is indicated as Upper, Boven, Oben, Superior or Haut. In the case of the Low Countries / the Netherlands the geographical location of the lower region has been more or less downstream and near the sea. The geographical location of the upper region, however, changed over time tremendously. The Romans made a distinction between the Roman provinces of downstream Germania Inferior (nowadays part of Belgium and the Netherlands) and upstream Germania Superior (nowadays part of Germany). The designation 'Low' to refer to the region returns again in the 10th century Duchy of Lower Lorraine, that covered much of the Low Countries.^[23][24] But this time the corresponding Upper region is Upper Lorraine, in nowadays Northern France.
The Dukes of Burgundy, who ruled the Low Countries in the 15th century, used the term les pays de par deçà (~ the lands over here) for the Low Countries as opposed to les pays de par delà (~ the lands over there) for their original homeland: Burgundy in present-day east-central France.^[25] Under Habsburg rule, Les pays de par deçà developed in pays d'embas (lands down-here),^[26] a deictic expression in relation to other Habsburg possessions in Europe. This was translated as Neder-landen in contemporary Dutch official documents.^[27] From a regional point of view, Niderlant was also the area between the Meuse and the lower Rhine in the late Middle Ages. The area known as Oberland (High country) was in this deictic context considered to begin approximately at the nearby higher located Cologne.
From the mid-sixteenth century on, "the Low Countries" and "the Netherlands" lost their original deictic meaning, and were – besides Flanders – probably the most commonly used names. The Eighty Years' War (1568–1648) divided the Low Countries into an independent northern Dutch Republic (or Latinised Belgica Foederata, "Federated Netherlands", the precursor state of the Netherlands) and a Spanish controlled Southern Netherlands (Latinised Belgica Regia, "Royal Netherlands", the precursor state of Belgium). The Low Countries today is a designation that includes the countries the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. It is used synonymous with the more neutral and geopolitical term Benelux.