Who Named the Planet Earth?

In most European languages, the planets are all named after Roman gods -- except for the planet you're hanging out on right now. Learn how Earth and the other planets got their names in this episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://science.howstuffworks.com/who-named-planet-earth.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey brain Stuff
Laura Vogelbaum. Here, the planets of our Solar system are bright,
mobile points of light in our night sky, and we
humans have thus been fascinated by them for thousands of years.
Ancient peoples all over the world noticed that these objects

(00:24):
shine like stars, but move differently, seemingly wandering through different constellations.
But we now know that this isn't really mysterious. It's
because the planets are in orbit around our Sun and
real stars aren't. Still, our word planet comes from an
ancient Greek term meaning wanderer. Ancient Greeks named the five

(00:48):
brightest planets those that can be seen with the naked
eye for their dominant attributes. They then assigned each one
as being sacred to or part of the domain of
a coordinating god of their pantheon. A side note, the
Greeks possibly borrowed this from Babylonian associations with the planets,
but it's complicated at any rate. That is how a

(01:10):
large bright planet was connected with Zeus, the king of
the gods. The brightest was given to Aphrodite, a goddess
of love and beauty. The red one to Ares, the
god of war, and the fastest to Hermes, the fleet
footed messenger of the gods. The slowest moving planet seen,
perhaps as Stately, was associated with Chronos, a father of Zeus.

(01:33):
The ancient Romans borrowed a lot from the Greeks, including
their mythology and the association of the planets with certain gods,
though the Romans sort of skipped the middleman and named
those planets directly for the Roman versions of those gods,
and because the Romans language Blatin was the lingua franca
of European science long after the fall of the Empire,

(01:54):
those names stuck in most European languages, with the few
variations on spelling and pronunciation, which is how we arrived
in English at kingly Jupiter, bright, Venus, red Mars, quick Mercury,
and stately Saturn. A scientist's discovered telescopes throughout these sixteen

(02:15):
and seventeen hundreds, leading to the discovery of two new planets.
After some argument, astronomers agreed to roll with the ancient
naming convention, thus giving us Uranus, which is a Latinized
version of the Greek god of the sky, and Neptune
with its blue tint named for the Roman god of
the sea, and whether you consider Pluto a true planet

(02:38):
or not, you can see our episode about that for more.
It was named for the Roman god of the underworld,
given its existence out in the cold, dark reaches of
the Solar System. The name was suggested in nineteen thirty
by an English schoolgirl of Venetia, Bernie. Urban legends say
that she named the planet after the dog Pluto from

(02:59):
Walt Disney's Making Mount cartoons, but it seems to be
the other way around. A Disney's cartoon Pooch went by
Rover until nineteen thirty one, when his name was switched
to Pluto. All of this means that of the planets
in our Solar System, Earth is the only one in
most European languages not named from Greek or Roman mythology.

(03:21):
So where did the name Earth come from? The short
answer is that the word earth just means the ground.
That's what the name for our planet means in pretty
much every language. Earth specifically, is a term for the
ground that we've been using with a few sound and
spelling modifications since the earliest recorded form of English about

(03:43):
a thousand years ago. Old English borrowed it from a
Proto Germanic term that also gave rise to modern German
and Dutch words for our planet. All of these may
root from a term for the ground in what's called
proto Indo European, a hypothetical common ancest of all of
the Indo European languages that was spoken at least four

(04:03):
thousand years ago. Other European languages use Latin roots like
terra meaning the land or mundus meaning the universe, and
even totally unrelated languages like Mandarin use words that mean
the land, all of which makes sense. We didn't understand

(04:24):
Earth to be a planet like Jupiter or Mars until
around the fifteen hundreds, so before then we were just
talking about the ground beneath our feet, and again those
names more or less stuck. By the way, Earth is
sometimes spelled with a lowercase E, which indicates that you're

(04:45):
talking about, you know, actual dirt or land. When you're
talking about the planet as a whole, it is a
proper noun, and thus capital e Earth as a sign
of respect for this glorious dirt ball that gives us life.
Today's episode is based on the article who named Planet

(05:05):
Earth on HowStuffWorks? Dot com written by Mark Mancini. Brain
Stuff is production of by Heart Radio in partnership with
HowStuffWorks dot com and it is produced by Tyler Klang.
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