Naming
The Tibetan name for Mount Everest is Chomolungma or Qomolangma , which means "Saint Mother"), and the Chinese transliteration is Zhumùlangma Feng (simplified Chinese: ; traditional Chinese: or translate as Shèngmu Feng (simplified Chinese: ???; traditional Chinese: , but seldomly use). 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 officially given its English name by the Royal Geographical Society after being proposed by Andrew Waugh, the British surveyor-general of India. 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 IPA: is in fact different from Sir George's own pronunciation of his surname, which was
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 gave Mount Everest the official name Sagarmatha . This name had not previously been used; the local inhabitants knew the mountain as Chomolungma. 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 Nepalese name for the mountain because the Sherpa/Tibetan name Chomolangma was not acceptable, as it would have been against the idea of unification (Nepalization) of the country.
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.