Translations of the Bible into
English was one of the earliest recorded uses of the name Earth –
"God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered
together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good."
It is called ‘terra’ in Portuguese, ‘dünya’ in Turkish and ‘aarde’
in Dutch. The common thread in all languages is that they were all
derived from the same meaning in their origins, which is ‘ground’
or ‘soil’.
The modern English word and name for our planet Earth goes back at
least 1,000 years. Just as the English language evolved from
‘Anglo-Saxon’ (English-German) with the migration of certain
Germanic tribes from the continent to Britain in the fifth century
AD, the word ‘Earth’ came from the Anglo-Saxon word ‘erda’ and its
Germanic equivalent ‘erde’ which means ground or soil. In Old
English, the word became ‘eor(th)e’ or 'ertha '.
The Moon did have other names, including the name of an ancient
deity, Luna, the Roman Goddess of the Moon. The word Luna is still
associated with the Moon. For instance, Luna is the root of words
like lunar.
When humanity first learned of other moons orbiting the planets in
our solar system, one of the primary reasons they were given names
was to differentiate them from the Moon, which is still the
official name of our moon in English. The word “moon” can be
traced back to Old English, where it is said to have derived from
the Proto-Germanic word “menon”, which in turn derived from the
Proto-Indo-European “menses”, meaning “month, moon”.
With few exceptions, the Moon has long been associated with women,
fertility, and a whole host of other female attributes. In most
cases, menstrual cycles more or less coincide with the phases of
the Moon. It should then come as no surprise that across many
languages, the words for “moon”, “month”, and the name for a
woman’s menstrual cycle often has the same root word.