Kosovo - Name

Name

Kosovo (Serbian Cyrillic: Косово, ) is the Serbian neuter possessive adjective of kos (кос) "blackbird", an ellipsis for Kosovo Polje, 'blackbird field', the site of the 1389 Battle of Kosovo Field. The name of the field was applied to an Ottoman province created in 1864.

The region currently known as "Kosovo" became an administrative region in 1946, as the Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija. In 1974, the compositional "Kosovo and Metohija" was reduced to a simple "Kosovo" in the name of the Socialist Autonomous Province of Kosovo, but in 1990 the region was renamed the Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija.

The entire region is commonly referred to in English simply as Kosovo and in Albanian as Kosova (definite form, ) or Kosovë ("indefinite" form, ). In Serbia, a distinction is made between the eastern and western areas; the term Kosovo (Косово) is used for the eastern part, while the western part is called Metohija (Метохија).