Earth is the only planet not named after a God

 

Earth is the only planet not named after a God

Nobody knows how the Earth got its name; all we know is that it is derived from an amalgamation of both the Old English and Old Germanic words for “ground”.

April 22 is Earth Day. The English name, from the 15th century, for the planet we inhabit came from the Old English eorþe, meaning both “ground, soil, dirt, dry land; country, district” and “the material world, the abode of man”, which descended from the Proto-Germanic erþ ō, from the Proto-Indo-European root er- (“earth”, “ground”).

Earth is the only planet in our solar system not named after a Greco-Roman deity. The name used in Western academia during the Renaissance was Tellus Mater or Terra Mater, the Latin for “earth mother”, i.e. “Mother Earth”, god­dess of the earth in ancient Roman religion and mytho­logy. From the Latin terra – with origins in the Proto-Indo-European ters-, meaning “dry” – the Romance langu­ages derived their word for Earth, including the French La Terre, Italian La Terra and Spanish La Tierra.