On Language; Name That Nation

On this Independence Day weekend, it is fitting and timely to ask: Who coined the name United States of America?

In the year before independence, many in the colonies went with the name used by Benjamin Franklin in his July 1775 draft of an articles of confederation: United Colonies of North America. Another name, however, most famously appeared in print on July 4, 1776, in the Declaration of Independence, which was drafted by a committee that assigned the task to Thomas Jefferson: its last paragraph referred to ''the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress Assembled.''

In our first exploration of this mystery a few months ago, it was reported that the widely accepted Jefferson coinage (written by Young Tom between June 11 and June 28, 1776) might have been antedated by two other citations: the first in a letter from the Continental Congress member Elbridge Gerry to Gen. Horatio Gates dated June 25, and the second in a letter to The Pennsylvania Evening Post published June 29, from the pseudonymous writer ''Republicus.''

This is important; it's our country we're talking about, and we ought to try to pin down its namer. Two letters have come pouring in. One is from a biographer of Thomas Paine, Prof. Jack Fruchtman Jr., of Towson University in Maryland, who insists that Paine's usage two years after the Declaration in his widely read ''American Crisis'' publicized the name. Call me a summer soldier or sunshine patriot, but common sense tells me that a popularizer is not a coiner.

Comes now Ronald Gephart, last of the editors of the Library of Congress's 25-volume ''Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774-1789.'' He searched his new CD-ROM of all that correspondence, then dug around in the Journals of the Continental Congress, and alerted me to his findings just in time for the nation's 222d anniversary.

Richard Henry Lee of Virginia was the Founder who made the motion on June 7, 1776, to declare ''that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.'' His resolution led to the formation of three committees: one, starring Jefferson and John Adams, to draft a declaration of independence; another, including John Dickenson, the conservative Pennsylvanian, and Roger Sherman, to draft articles of confederation, and a third, including Dickenson, Adams and Franklin, to draft a treaty plan.