They were so called by the exonym by the New Netherlanders, who commonly referred to the people by the indigenous word for their territory.
The genus name, like that of Araucaria, is derived from the Spanish exonym Araucanos ("from Arauco"), referring to the Mapuche people of Chile and Argentina who live in the surviving forests of Araucaria today.
The French exonym for Veurne, previously used in English, a city in West Flanders, Belgium
Germania was the Latin exonym for a geographical area of land on the east bank of the Rhine (inner Germania), which included regions of Sarmatia as well as an area under Roman control on the west bank of the Rhine.
The early Chinese exonym Man 蠻 "southern barbarians" was a graphic pejorative written with Radical 142 虫, the "insect" or "reptile" radical.
This exonym is from the closely related Nahuatl word -pil "son, boy" (Nahuatl is a dialect complex that includes languages and dialects of these such as Classical Nahuatl, Milpa Alta Nahuatl, Tetelcingo Nahuatl, Matlapa, Isthmus-Mecayapan Nahuat, among others).
Equivalent terms are exonym ("outside name") and endonym ("inside name"), used especially in toponomastics for place names (toponyms) deriving either from a local language (endonym) or from a distant/foreign language (exonym).
The American anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon adopted this term to use as an exonym to refer to the culture and, by extension, the people.