How did the Earth earn its name?

How did the Earth earn its name?

The original namer of Earth, like many other solar system objects, has long been lost to history. Linguistics, on the other hand, provides a few hints. In Anglo-Saxon, one of the parent languages of English, Ertha is an approximate spelling for "the ground" (meaning, the earth upon which we stand).

The word "Anglo-Saxon" refers to a cultural group that resided in modern-day England and Wales between the fifth century and the Norman Conquest of 1066, shortly after the Roman Empire dissolved.

Ertha in Anglo-Saxon "means the ground on which you walk, the ground in which you sow your crops," according to Gillian Hovell, a freelance archaeologist and historian known as "The Muddy Archaeologist."

According to Hovell, Ertha is also linked to a place where life emerges and possibly to ancestors who are buried in the ground. However, depending on the culture, the name's meaning can alter.

Other common modern titles for "Earth" are derived from Latin. Hovell defined terra as "land" – "the land on which you are standing, farming, or otherwise interacting." That is where the modern English words "terrestrial," "subterranean," and "extraterrestrial" come from. 

Orbis was used by authors to describe Earth as a globe. "They knew it was a globe," Hovell said of the ancient Romans, who closely followed Greek science; Eratosthenes estimated the circumference of our world in 240 B.C.

"It was a globe of lands," Hovell stated of the orbis concept; orbis is the root word for "orbit." There was another phrase, mundus, which was used to describe the entire universe.

"The world is everything that contains us [humans], but it was quite obviously separate from the planets," Hovell explained of mundus. Mundus is represented in modern French terms such as monde (world), Italian mondo, Spanish mundo, and Portuguese mundo, as well as other "Romance language" progenitors of Latin.

Pliny the Elder (Gaius Plinius Secundus), a Roman author who produced a huge series of volumes on natural history in the first century, used mundus frequently in his observations, according to Hovell. Pliny also provided most of the vocabulary used to name planets by the International Astronomical Union, while each culture has its own customs and monikers.

The Romans employed a custom of planet naming that stretches back at least to the Babylonians. Babylonia was a sophisticated state in modern-day Iraq and Syria primarily remembered for its ruler, Hammurabi, who is connected with a legal system produced during his reign.

Babylonia existed from around 1900 until 539 B.C., when it was conquered by the Persians (then the Achaemenid Empire). The Persians became the Greeks' main adversary, yet the two empires also shared a vast deal of intercultural knowledge. According to Hovell, this is how the Greeks assimilated some of Persia's gods.

When the Romans rose to prominence, they incorporated customs from the regions they visited, notably Greece, into their own pantheon of gods. This permitted a Babylonian goddess of love, Ishtar, to become Aphrodite to the Greeks and Venus to the Romans, for example. (However, because Roman gods and goddesses had traits based on their location, celestial timings, and other considerations, this is a very simplified timeline.)

Except for Earth, all of the planets were named after Greek and Roman gods and goddesses. Earth is an English/German name that simply means "the ground." It is derived from the Old English terms 'eor(th)e' and'ertha'. It is 'erde' in German. The name Earth has been used for at least 1000 years.

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