(while the survey wanted to preserve local names if possible (e.g. kangchenjunga and dhaulagiri), waugh argued that he could not find any commonly used local name)
Waugh’s search for a local name was hampered by Nepal and Tibet’s exclusion of foreigners. Many local names existed, including “Deodungha” (“Holy Mountain”) in Darjeeling[18] and the Tibetan “Chomolungma”, which appeared on a 1733 map published in Paris by the French geographer D’Anville. In the late 19th century, many European cartographers incorrectly believed that a native name for the mountain was Gaurishankar, which is a mountain between Kathmandu and Everest.[19]
Waugh argued that because there were many local names, it would be difficult to favour one name over all others, so he decided that Peak XV should be named after Welsh surveyor Sir George Everest, his predecessor as Surveyor General of India.[15][20][21] Everest himself opposed the name suggested by Waugh and told the Royal Geographical Society in 1857 that “Everest” could not be written in Hindi nor pronounced by “the native of India”. Waugh’s proposed name prevailed despite the objections, and in 1865, the Royal Geographical Society officially adopted Mount Everest as the name for the highest mountain in the world.[15] The modern pronunciations of Everest (/ˈɛvərᵻst/ and /ˈɛvrᵻst/)[22] are different from Sir George’s pronunciation of his surname (/ˈiːvrᵻst/, eev-rist).[23]
The Tibetan name for Mount Everest is ཇོ་མོ་གླང་མ (IPA: [t͡ɕʰòmòlɑ́ŋmɑ̀],[citation needed] lit. “Holy Mother”), whose official Tibetan pinyin form is Qomolangma. It is also popularly romanised as Chomolungma and (in Wylie) as Jo-mo-glang-ma or Jomo Langma.[28] The official Chinese transcription is 珠穆朗玛峰 (t 珠穆朗瑪峰),whose pinyin form is Zhūmùlǎngmǎ Fēng (“Chomolungma Peak”).[29] It is also infrequently simply translated into Chinese as Shèngmǔ Fēng (t 聖母峰,s 圣母峰, lit. “Holy Mother Peak”). In 2002, the Chinese People’s Daily newspaper published an article making a case against the use of “Mount Everest” in English, insisting that the mountain should be referred to as “Mount Qomolangma”,[29] based on the official form of the local Tibetan name. The article argued that British colonialists did not “first discover” the mountain, as it had been known to the Tibetans and mapped by the Chinese as “Qomolangma” since at least 1719.[30]
(In the early 1960s, the Nepalese government coined a Nepali name for Mount Everest, Sagarmāthā or Sagar-Matha (सगरमाथा), allegedly to supplant the Tibetan name among the locals, a usage which the Nepali government felt was “not acceptable”)