Etymology

The name Pakistan literally means "Land of the Pure" in Urdu and Persian. It was coined in 1933 as Pakstan by Choudhary Rahmat Ali, a Pakistan Movement activist, who published it in his pamphlet Now or Never,^[13] using it as an acronym ("thirty million Muslim brethren who live in PAKSTAN") referring to the names of the five northern regions of the British Raj: Punjab, North-West Frontier Province (Afghania Province), Kashmir, Sindh, and Baluchistan".^[14][15][16] The letter i was incorporated to ease pronunciation and form the linguistically correct and meaningful name.