Eli5: Why do people from the USA (and not only from there)consider the word American to only refer to their country?

That doesn't change the fact that America is the name of one or two continents

In the vast majority of English-speaking countries America is not the name of a continent, so it does not make sense to call people from a geographical sense "American". There is North America and South America and so there are North and South Americans. Your point is like an English speaker trying to say that Germans should call themselves German because their country is called Germany, when in their own native language they are Deutschland. You can't apply your local language and world view to dictate how a separate language and country should refer to themselves.

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