In Roman mythology, Jupiter was the king of the gods and had an honored place in Rome’s pre-Christian religion. Mythology also held that Rome’s legendary founders, Romulus and Remus, were born of the warlike god Mars, himself Jupiter’s son.
Similarly, “Mother Earth” and “Mother Nature” have roots in Greek mythology. Gaia was the Greek goddess of Earth, and the Greeks believed she “gave birth” to the nature all around them, as she was the origin of all life. The Roman equivalent of Gaia was Terra Mater.
Astronomy has always been a popular subject for those who study Classics, and that meant that seven out of the eight planets in our solar system were named after a Greek or Roman god. There’s only one planet that’s not, and you’re on it right now.
In English, the term “earth” derived from the Old English word “eorþe.” Eorþe had multiple meanings, though, including “soil,” “dirt,” “ground,” “dry land” and “country.” But the planet’s name didn’t come from the English. Old English is just the earliest known stage of what became modern English. Old English was used until about 1150 CE, but it had evolved from another, parent, language: “Proto-Germanic.”
The German spoken today is part of the same linguistic family as Old English. “Earth” and “eorþe” are therefore related to the modern German word “Erde,” which is not only the name for our home planet, but is also used to refer to dirt and soil.
Earth, though, is more complex than you’d think; it has relatives in other languages, too. There’s the Old Saxon “ertha,” the Old Frisian “erthe,” and the Dutch word “aarde,” which all likely descend from a Proto-Germanic term that was never written or passed down from our ancestors.
Linguists, however, have been able to reconstruct this mystery word, but when they write “ertho” in scholarly texts, it’s always preceded by an asterisk, acknowledging the lack of written confirmation that the word was actually used and isn’t a mere curiosity.
So, back to naming the planets. Not surprisingly, no one is certain about when people started using words like “Earth” or “Erde” to refer to the planet as a whole and not just a patch of ground. In 1783, German astronomer Johann Elert Bode named the seventh planet from our sun “Uranus” after a Greek god. And though Pluto has been demoted to a dwarf planet, we know that an English 11-year-old girl named Venetia Burney named it in 1930 (see below).
But as for naming our home planet Earth, it’s highly unlikely that a single person gave it its “official” name, and even if they did, there’s no historical record to confirm who it was or when it happened. Still, it’s quite clear that Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune all carry the proper names of ancient Greek and Roman gods, but “Earth” doesn’t. That’s why you sometimes see “the earth” with a lowercase “e” instead of with a capital letter.
The University of Oxford Style Guide weighs in on this topic, indicating the word “Earth” should be capitalized when one is “referring to the name of the planet but not when referring to the ground/soil etc.”
And now back to Venetia Burney. Urban legend has it that Burney named Pluto after the dog from Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse cartoons. Historians, though, have proven otherwise. The dog in the cartoon went by “Rover” until 1931, when the writers switched his name to “Pluto.” By then, Burney had already suggested the name “Pluto” for the once-ninth planet.
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