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The toponym al-Andalus (الأندلس) is first attested in inscriptions on coins minted by the Umayyad rulers of Iberia, from ca. 715.
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The etymology of the name has traditionally been derived from the name of the Vandals (who settled in Hispania in the 5th century). A number of proposals since the 1980s have contested this: Vallvé (1986) proposed derivation of the name of the Atlantic. Halm (1989) derives the name from a reconstructed Gothic term *landahlauts. Bossong (2002) suggests derivation from a pre-Roman substrate.
The Spanish form Andalucía was introduced in the 13th century. The name was adopted to refer those territories still under the Moorish rule until then, and generally south of Castilla Nueva and Valencia, and corresponding with the former Roman province hitherto called Baetica in Latin sources. This was a Castilianization of Al-Andalusiya, the adjectival form of the Arabic word al-Andalus.
Vandals theory
The name Andalusia or Vandalusia is traditionally believed to be derived from Vandal (the Germanic tribe that briefly colonized parts of Iberia from 409 to 429). The derivation goes back to the 13th-century De rebus Hispaniae, but has been viewed critically from the 18th century. Reinhart Dozy (1881) recognized its shortcomings but nevertheless accepted that al-Andalus derived from Vandal, suggesting that geographically it originally referred only to the harbour from which the Vandals departed Iberia for (North) Africa in AD 429. Dozy's view was adopted in the first edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam in 1913 and became the mainstream view held in 20th-century scholarship.
Atlantic theory
Another proposal is that Andalus is an Arabic-language version of the name of the Atlantic. This idea has recently been defended by Vallvé (1986).
Vallvé writes:
Arabic texts offering the first mentions of the island of Al-Andalus and the sea of Al-Andalus become extraordinarily clear if we substitute this expressions with "Atlantis" or "Atlantic". The same can be said with reference to Hercules and the Amazons whose island, according to Arabic commentaries of these Greek and Latin legends, was located in jauf Al-Andalus—that is, to the north or interior of the Atlantic Ocean.
The Island of al-Andalus is mentioned in an anonymous Arabic chronicle of the conquest of Iberia composed two to three centuries after the fact. It is identified as the location of the landfall of the advance guard of the Moorish conquest of Iberia. The chronicle also says that "Island of al-Andalus" was subsequently renamed "Island of Tarifa". The preliminary conquest force of a few hundred, led by the Berber chief, Tarif abu Zura, seized the first bit of land they encountered after crossing the Strait of Gibraltar in 710. The main conquest force led by Tariq ibn Ziyad followed them a year later. The landfall, now known in Spain as either Punta Marroquí or Punta de Tarifa, is in fact the southern tip of an islet, presently known as Isla de Tarifa or Isla de las Palomas, just offshore of the Iberian mainland.
Gothic theory
Halm (1989) proposed a Gothic etymology. Drawing attention to the term Gothica sors, a Latin exonym of the Visigothic kingdom translating to "Gothic lot". Halm reconstructs a Gothic term which would correspond to this Latin term, meaning "lot lands", as *landahlauts. This hypothetical Gothic language term would have given rise both to the Latin loan translation Gothica sors and to the Arabic al-Andalus (by phonetic imitation).