Cambodia has changed its name so many times over the last few decades that there are understandable grounds for confusion. To the Cambodians, their country is Kampuchea. The name is   • derived from the word Kambuja, meaning 'those born of Kambu', the mythical founder of the country. It dates back as far as the 10th century. The Portuguese 'Camboxa' and the French 'Cambodge', from which the English name 'Cambodia' is derived, are adaptations of 'Kambuja'. Since gaining independence in 1953, the country has been known in English by various names before coming full circle:

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 The Kingdom of Cambodia
The Khmer Republic (under Lon Nol, who reigned from 1970 to 1975)
Democratic Kampuchea (under the Khmer Rouge, which controlled the country from 1975 to 1979)
The People's Republic of Kampuchea (under the Vietnamese-backed Phnom Penh govern­ment from 1 979 to 1989
The State of Cambodia (from mid-1989)
The Kingdom of Cambodia (from May 1993)
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It was the Khmer Rouge that insisted the outside world use the name Kampuchea. Changing the country's official English name back to Cambodia (which was used by the US all along) was intended as a symbolic move to distance the present government in Phnom Penh from the bitter connotations of the name Kampuchea, which Westerners associate with the murderous Khmer Rouge regime.