Funnily enough, the man it was named after was against calling it that. It came about because the Tibetans and Nepalis on either side of the mountain used different names for it (Qomolangma and Sagarmatha respectively), so British surveyors concluded that there was no accepted name to put on a map and they would simply give it a new one. In English. George Everest, the prior top British surveyor in India, objected on the grounds that his name couldn't be written easily in Hindi, but the Royal Geographic Society ignored him and the used it anyway