Earth & SkyGreek → English
Astronaut
/ˈæstrənɔt/noun
A person trained to travel in a spacecraft.
The Greek roots
ἄστρον
ástron
star
ναύτης
naútēs
sailor
Literally: “star sailor”
The story of the word
The compound is modelled on Argonaut, the crew who sailed the Argo, and it turned up in fiction long before anyone flew: Percy Greg named his spaceship the Astronaut in an 1880 novel. NASA adopted the word as a job title in 1958. The Soviet cosmonaut is built the same way on κόσμος, so one of them sails the stars and the other sails the whole universe.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1920s
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
astronomycosmonautargonautnauticalastrology
In a sentence
Every astronaut in that photograph had been a test pilot first.
She wanted to be an astronaut until she found out about the centrifuge.