Madagascar is a country that is also a very large island in the Indian Ocean, off the southeast coast of Africa. Its capital is Antananarivo. It is famous for plants and animals that live wild almost nowhere else — lemurs are the example people know best. About 22 million people lived there in 2014; the number is higher now. In English we use Madagascar for the place; a person from there is Madagascan or, often, Malagasy. The name came into English from French (Middle French Madagascar, from an older form Madageiscar). People often tell this story: the traveler Marco Polo mixed the island up with Mogadishu, a city on the African mainland, and the mixed-up name stuck. That story is widely repeated; scholars do not all agree it is the whole truth, and old Arabic maps had other names for islands in that sea. What we can say safely is that English borrowed the name through French, rather than inventing it.