Gaul

Its discoverer had to publish a denial that he had secretly named the element after himself.

Paul-Emile Lecoq de Boisbaudran found gallium by spectroscopy in Paris in 1875 and named it from Gallia, the Latin name for Gaul. Critics pointed out that Latin gallus means rooster, which is le coq in French, and accused him of self-naming. He denied it in print in 1877. Gallium had been predicted by Mendeleev as eka-aluminum, and its discovery was an early confirmation of the periodic table.