Not something I thought of a lot when I was back in US since USA is… a pretty bureaucratic name by all means. But I just realized that some countries have really fascinating names in their local language
Like how China names itself Central/Middle country in a very grandiose way (as in, we are the center of the world), or Japan being “land of the rising sun”
Norway is quite literal: The way north.
It used to describe the coastline full of seaside trading towns before someone got the idea to make it a country.
The literalness also shows up in all the names for places in the country. They are 90% old spellings of “The place where people live”, “the field for cows to feed on”, “the settlement at the north of the fjord”, “upper farm”, “valley settlement”, and like 1837 places called “a place you can live”.