Earth & SkyGreek → English
Asteroid
/ˈæstərɔɪd/noun
A small rocky body orbiting the sun, most of them between Mars and Jupiter.
The Greek roots
ἀστήρ
astḗr
star
εἶδος
eîdos
form, appearance
Literally: “star-shaped”
The story of the word
William Herschel proposed the word in 1802 for Ceres and Pallas: through a telescope they stayed points of light, star-like, while a real planet shows a disc. Other astronomers disliked the coinage and went on calling the objects planets for decades. The same ἀστήρ is buried in disaster, an event under a bad star.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1802
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
astronomyasteriskdisasterastral
In a sentence
The asteroid passed closer than the moon and nobody saw it coming.
Most asteroids are lumps of rubble held together by their own weak gravity.