I hear "The states," "The US," and "America" equally used here in Cali. Almost never do I hear "The USA" unless it's said like "the good 'ol US of A."

Safe to just call it shithole now.

I refer to it as "the US", but refer to myself as an "American."

“This is America! I’ll call it whatever I want!”

I use America a lot

In my country you can know someone's politics just by knowing if they call people from the USA americanos or estadounidenses.

I use "the U.S." or "States".

There's more than one America.

I heard in a podcast recently that many people in the US still believed Africa was a country, and I couldn’t help but wonder if this is somehow related to their using the name of their continent to designate their own country.

Red Green calls us "americans", i call us fucked. Take your pick.

I've noticed this too but it seems like a left vs right thing. But never "the USA"

That's just not true.

I'll call it "the US" at the beginning of a conversation but mix it in with America afterwards as the context shows I'm talking about the US and not the continent.

It's a question of shorthand and relative distance to the country. In most European languages, the spelling equivalent of America refers to the country by default. The continent as an entity doesn't get mentioned that much and when it does either context gets you there or a regional attribute like a cardinal direction or central. In my experience this applies to British English as well. "The United States" is often more cumbersome in translation and might require grammatical inflection when used in a local language - and confusingly could refer to Mexico as well. Funny enough though some languages adopted "USA" as another way to refer to the country, even if in translation this should get you a different letter combination.

Because of the dominance of the English in the United Kingdom, a lot of continental Europeans lazily refer to the UK as their version of "England." Might be Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, a channel island or what have you. We gave up in trying to distinguish. People and how they call places are like that. Quiet understanding beats accuracy.

Because I've been told by people of the other nations of these two continents that it bugs them and I had a nice and easy alternative

US Americans seem to refer to themselves as “Americans” a lot on social media. Or they refer to themselves as “the world” like in “this icecream is the best in the world” (without having visited any other country for a significant time to be able to compare). In Europe, US Americans are referred to by different names: the popular „yanks“, the German “Amis” (die spinnen doch, die Amis), depends on the country. The prevalence of new names is increasing rapidly, e.g. Trumpists, US twerks, dropkicks.

When I hear the word "America", I always have the mental image of someone that speaks English in a non-American (or even non-Anglosphere) accent, and that this person either really likes America or really hates The US, no in between. Like sometimes I picture a person saying "America" in a heavy russian accent I think it just sounds so funny. I think I watched too many movies and I just like the russian accent... it sounds very intimidating and that's why it had that sort of "cool factor".

Also, I kinda mix both depending on how my brain is thinking. Sometimes I think my thoughts in Chinese and the "美國" automatically converts into English as "America", cuz nobody says "合眾國" (United States) in Chinese (at least not in the variants/"dialects" that I know of), cuz it feels like a generic term like "The Republic", doesn't make a lot of sense unless referring specifically to domestic politics.

As a Naturalized American Citizen, I sometimes feel like the term "American Citizen" feels like a wrong term, and the term "US Citizen" feels more "correct" to say.

I think that in Chinese, sometimes I hear "民國" (shortened from the full term 中華民國) to refer to ROC and I think "共和國" (shortened from the full term 中華人民共和國) can similarly be used similar to refer to PRC, when used in the context of Chinese history.

I use them interchangeably. 🤷

I hear almost exclusively people referring to the country as "America". This was actually a very conscious shift at the turn of the 20th century for people in public life to refer to the country as "America" instead of "the US" or "the United States" as we ..... acquired overseas territories and weren't a country only of United States anymore

The dumber kids I went to middle school with called it America

Granted, that was in the 90s

Definitely a regional thing.

Most notably, the region of the United States in the Americas.

I'm all for a less voracious term by which to refer to ourselves, but it'd help if it were a little neater than "United Statesian."

I use both as well as USA and united states.

Could be regional, but I hear it quite often.

There are some instances where it feels more correct to say US, but for everyday use I probably say America more.