The Etymology of Sweden
Sweden in its English form is a 17th-century borrowing from Dutch, where Sweden was used as a plural-style country name from the people-name Swede. The deeper root is Old Norse Svíar, the self-designation of the Swedes, descending from Proto-Germanic *Sweboz — a tribal label meaning, roughly, those of our own kin. It is built on the Indo-European reflexive *swe- (oneself, one's own), the same morpheme behind Latin sui (of oneself), and the related ethnonym Suebi that Roman writers like Tacitus applied to a major Germanic confederation. The native Swedish name for the country is Sverige, contracted from Sveariket — the kingdom of the Sviar. The country thus carries, like many Germanic ethnonyms, an in-group label rather than a description: it does not name a place, a feature, or a founder, but simply our own people. The Dutch, English, and German forms (Sweden, Sweden, Schweden) are all ultimately the same plural ethnonym.