Introducing “The Usonian”, a newsletter about storytelling and design

In 1903, an American writer by the name of James Duff Law introduced a new word into the English lexicon: Usonia.

His rationale for creating the term “Usonia” and its related demonym, “Usonian,” was to create an alternative to calling the US and its citizens “Americans.” This was because the term “American” shortchanged all the citizens of other nations part of the two American continents.

Law’s Usonia was actually an acronym, representing the “United States of Northern Independent America.” Mr. Law initially cooked up the word “Usona,” but thought it didn’t sound so great, so he threw “Independent” into the acronym to allow the word roll off the tongue.

“Usonia” had some interesting adopters. Frank Lloyd Wright used it as a tagline to promote the “United States as it ought to be” and his brand of “more” affordable single-family homes (because, in his view, America ought to have been refashioned in his architectural style).

L.L. Zamenhof, the founder of the constructed language Esperanto, used the word “Usono” to refer to the United States within the Esperanto lexicon. Since then, Usonia has had some niche and esoteric usage, brought up every once in a while, and not just in Esperanto conventions.