Etymology

The name Pakistan means Land of the Pure in Urdu and Persian. It was coined in 1934 as Pakstan by Choudhary Rahmat Ali, a Pakistan movement activist, who published it in his pamphlet Now or Never. The name is a portmanteau representing the "thirty million Muslims of PAKISTAN, who live in the six Northern Units of British Raj — Punjab, Afghania (now known as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa), Kashmir, Islamabad Capital Territory, Sindh and Balochistan.

However, the authorship of the name is controversial. It is also maintained that the word Pakistan was invented by Khawaja Abdul Rahim and he obtained Sir Muhammad Iqbal’s blessings for his coinage. Sir Muhammad Iqbal himself wrote to Prof. Edward John Thompson of Oxford University, that "Pakistan scheme proposes a separate federation of Muslim Provinces directly related to England as a separate dominion. This scheme originated in Cambridge. The authors of this scheme believe that. The word "authors" means that there are more than one author. According to Stephen Philip Cohen,a group of Indian students at Cambridge proposed naming it Pakistan.

References:: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistan