Continent Introductio", Waldseemüller noted that the earth is divided into four parts, Europe, Asia, Africa and the fourth part, which he named "America" after Amerigo Vespucci's first name. On the map, the word "America" was placed on part of South America. From the 16th century the English noun "continent" was derived from the term "continent land", meaning continuous or connected land and translated from the Latin "terra continens". The noun was used to mean "a connected or continuous tract of land" or mainland. It was not applied only to very large areas of land—in the 17th century, references were made to
Middle-earth Middle-earth Middle-earth is the fictional setting of much of British writer J. R. R. Tolkien's legendarium. The term is equivalent to the term "Midgard" of Norse mythology, describing the human-inhabited world, that is, the central continent of the Earth in Tolkien's imagined mythological past. Tolkien's most widely read works, "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings", take place entirely in Middle-earth, and "Middle-earth" has also become a short-hand to refer to the legendarium and Tolkien's fictional take on the world. Within his stories, Tolkien translated the name "Middle-earth" as "Endor" (or sometimes "Endórë") and "Ennor" in the Elvish languages