The first written Ukraine is a line of mourning. The Kyivan Chronicle, in its entry for 1187, records the death of Prince Volodimer Glebovich of Pereiaslavl. One translation reads: "The frontier (Ukraina) mourned a great deal for him."
That entry survives in the Hypatian Codex, copied around 1425. There the word names the steppe principality of Pereiaslavl, not a nation. It turns up again under 1189, this time for the frontier of Galicia.
What the word means is a live argument. Its root is the Slavic krai, from Proto-Slavic *krajь, "edge," itself linked to a verb meaning "to cut." A cut makes an edge, but it also marks off a piece of land. So krai can mean a boundary, or an area defined by one.
Most etymological dictionaries take the first path. Max Vasmer, Orest Subtelny and Paul Magocsi all read Ukraine as "borderland." Etymonline agrees, deriving it from ou, "by, at," plus kraj, "region." It describes the territory as a frontier zone at the time of the 13th-century Tatar invasion.
Many Ukrainian scholars read the same word as "region," "principality" or "country." The linguist Hryhoriy Pivtorak argued in 2001 that the Zaporozhian Cossacks had used Ukraine for their land since the 16th century. In his view the link to Russian okraina, "outskirts," was a creation of tsarist Russia. Russian scholars contest this. In modern Ukrainian, krajina simply means "country."
Usage over the centuries pulled in both directions. A 1580 decree by the Polish king Stefan Batory named five Ukraines: Ruthenian, Kyivan, Volhynian, Podolian and Bratslavian. After Bohdan Khmelnytsky came to power, Cossack officials increasingly used Ukraine in letters to the tsar.
The English article has its own history. "The Ukraine" was standard before independence, and critics said it made the country sound like a region. The Associated Press dropped "the" on 3 December 1991. In 2012 the Ukrainian embassy in London called the article "politically and grammatically incorrect."
The root is the same one found across the Slavic world, from the Krajina regions of Croatia and Bosnia to Bela krajina in Slovenia.