Naming

The Tibetan name for Mount Everest is Chomolungma or Qomolangma ,and the related Chinese name is Zhūmùlǎngmǎ Fēng . The Tibetan name, Chomolungma, gets a mention in the 2008 American film The Bucket List, in which one of the dying wishes of the two lead characters is to see the mountain. According to English accounts of the mid-19th century, the local name in Darjeeling for Mount Everest was Deodungha, or "Holy Mountain."In the 1960s, the Government of Nepal gave the mountain the official Nepali name of Sagarmatha , meaning "Goddess of the Sky".

In 1865, the mountain was given its English name by Andrew Waugh, the British surveyor-general of India. With both Nepal and Tibet closed to foreign travel, he wrote:

"I was taught by my respected chief and predecessor, Colonel Sir George Everest to assign to every geographical object its true local or native appellation. But here is a mountain, most probably the highest in the world, without any local name that we can discover, whose native appellation, if it has any, will not very likely be ascertained before we are allowed to penetrate into Nepal. In the meantime the privilege as well as the duty devolves on me to assign…a name whereby it may be known among citizens and geographers and become a household word among civilized nations."

Waugh chose to name the mountain after George Everest, first using the spelling Mont Everest, and then Mount Everest. However, the modern pronunciation of Everest is in fact different from Sir George's own pronunciation of his surname.

In the late 19th century many European cartographers incorrectly believed that a native name for the mountain was "Gaurisankar". This was a result of confusion of Mount Everest with the actual Gauri Sankar, which, when viewed from Kathmandu, stands almost directly in front of Everest.

In the early 1960s, the Nepalese government realized that Mount Everest had no Nepalese name. This was because the mountain was not known and named in ethnic Nepal (that is, the Kathmandu valley and surrounding areas). The government set out to find a name for the mountain (the Sherpa/Tibetan name Chomolangma was not acceptable, as it would have been against the idea of unification (Nepalization) of the country. The name Sagarmatha was thus invented by Baburam Acharya.

In 2002, the Chinese People's Daily newspaper published an article making a case against the continued use of the English name for the mountain in the Western world, insisting that it should be referred to by its Tibetan name. The newspaper argued that the Chinese (in nature a Tibetan) name preceded the English one, as Mount Qomolangma was marked on a Chinese map more than 280 years ago.