Aeronautics

The story of the word

French coined aéronaute within months of the Montgolfier balloon in 1783, and the sea metaphor never left: aircraft still have a rudder, a trim, a captain and a crew, and they measure speed in knots. ναύτης comes from ναῦς, ship, which also gives nausea, a word that originally meant nothing but seasickness. The Greeks had no flight, so the balloonists borrowed the only vocabulary for travelling through a fluid that existed.

How it travelled

Ancient Greek → French → English

First recorded

19th century