Have you ever wondered how Earth got its name?
The other nearby planets were all named for Roman gods and goddesses, which makes sense because of the time when they were first discovered.
Earth doesn’t follow the trend, though, and here’s why.
The word does have a complex etymology, stemming from the Germanic word “erda” and the Old Anglo-Saxon word “eartha,” both of which refer to “the ground that you walk on.”
The Anglo-Saxons were a Germanic tribe that occupied England and Wales around 450 CE, after the fall of the Roman Empire.
The ebb and flow of power there meant that culture and language also mutated over time, eventually leading to the emergence of the Old English language around the middle of the 7th century.
There, the word is “eorþe” (pronounced er-thuh), which means “soil,” “ground,” “country,” or “land.”
Northern European languages have similar words for this planet we live on – “Erde” in German and “Aarde” in Dutch, for example.
This leads language experts to believe they all came from a Proto-Germanic language that has now been all but lost.
The word meant a lot to people then, however, because the soil was a means for survival. It meant life and food, and was the place they typically returned to after death as well.
When it came to the Romans, the word “terra” meant “earth” or “ground” and was not nearly so mysterious as the names they gave the planets they glimpsed out there in the universe.
This is likely because for ancient people, our planet wasn’t understood as the same as those floating, unknowable orbs in the sky – because they didn’t realize we we doing the same thing.
The acceptance of heliocentrism – the fact that the sun is actually the center of the universe – in the 16th and 17th century was when people began to believe we were floating around on another planet.
By then, the mundane-but-essential name had stuck.
Since our relationship to the soil has not essentially changed, there was no reason to swap the name out for something new anyway.
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