Virginia
37.5000°N -79.0000°W · Q1370
2 English words in this atlas trace back to Virginia. It sits in United States.
Named by Europeans for a colony far larger than today's Virginia.
The vine reached European gardens from the early English colony and took its name there, though it grows wild from Canada to Mexico. Adhesive pads on its tendrils let it climb bare masonry, which is why it covers so many old walls nowhere near Virginia.
An element named for Virginia that turned out never to have been detected at all.
Fred Allison of the Alabama Polytechnic Institute announced element 87 in 1930 using a magneto-optic method of his own devising and named it virginium for his home state. No other laboratory could reproduce the effect, and the method was eventually discredited entirely. Element 87 was actually found by Marguerite Perey at the Curie Institute in 1939, and she named it francium.