Why are the United States often referred to as America?

People often refer to the country US as America and to the people from the US as Americans.

As far as I know, that's the only case in the world where a continent's name is used for a country's name (let me know if I'm wrong). Why does that happen?

This is a topic that leads to huge debates (and often flamewars) online whenever it is brought up.

Logically, it makes perfect sense to use "America" and "Americans" for this country. The name of the country is "United States of America". Why would it be strange to shorten this? It is common to shorten the official name of a country — most people don't even know the official names for the various countries. For example, the official name of Mexico is "los Estados Unidos Mexicanos", which means "the Mexican United States"; nobody is surprised that it is referred to as "Mexico". People would be surprised if you called them the "EUM". (Also, this example shows that even "United States" is not a unique term to one country.)

Australia is officially known as "the Commonwealth of Australia", but we are happy to simply call them "Australians", even though it is also the name of a continent. Depending on how you do your geography, the Australian continent also contains other countries aside from the "COA".

Lastly, I just want to point out that there is no single continent called "America". There is one called "North America" and another called "South America", which are sometimes collectively referred to as "the Americas".

I think the strange thing is not that people from the USA call themselves "Americans", it is actually more strange that the full official name or an acronym is used so often.

I thought Australia was part of Oceania; when did this change and Australia became a continent itself?

By the way, America is the whole continent; the subdivisions are only for the sake of geographic or geological study, but the continental plate is America.

Every time we, people who live in any place besides the United States of America, feel embarrassed when we hear about "being American is", "the spirit of America is", and such utterances. Because we're not "US citizens" nor will we ever be considered in that way, but we indeed live in “America”, so we could be proudly called Americans, but the patronimious (how do you say it in English?) has become synonymous of US citizens, politics, mind, behavior. Sometimes we don't agree in no way with any of those points, and we feel excluded with a word that should unite us.

That said, I dare to say that using Americans for the citizenship of the United States is wrong for the rest of the continent, but as it has been used constantly by the United States all over the globe, that use have given another meaning to the word, succeeding in segregating people who feels America is also its land.

When I traveled to Europe, every time I was asked if I was from America, I corrected them to the name of my own country and emphasized that we're not in America (strange to say indeed).

By the way, in general Europeans understand the concept pretty well, but US citizens don't, and in general they don't even understand what they have done with the word. It’s like they are humans so the citizens of United States are called humans. Imagine the rest of the world should feel not so good about being called humans when they live in let's say, Russia?

Nothing against the United States anyway. Just to clear things up.

It's actually just the result of using half of the country's full name to save time. The country is officially called "the United States of America".

In fact, if you think about it, something like "the United States" doesn't quality as an unambiguous country name. There were many city-states in Europe, a lot of which united under the rules of different kings. These were united states, as well. Japan has several prefectures which are essentially states in their own right. These are united under the Japanese government. We could use united states (or united prefectures) to refer to these.

The Western world was named after Amerigo Vespucci, which led to the continents being named "North America" and "South America". At first America was a collection of several colonies, each with their own currency and government. When several states within North America all united to form a single government, they called themselves the "United States of America".

Some people abbreviate this as "United States", others as "America", others as "USA".