Earth & SkyGreek → English
Cosmogony
/kɒzˈmɒɡəni/noun
An account of how the universe came into being, mythic or scientific.
The Greek roots
κόσμος
kósmos
order, world
-γονία
-gonía
begetting, coming to be
Literally: “world birth”
The story of the word
κόσμος means arrangement first and universe second, the sense that survives in "cosmetic": the world got its name for being ordered. Hesiod's Theogony is the model, gods emerging in sequence out of Chaos, and every later cosmogony borrows its shape from that kind of genealogy. Astronomers used the word for solar system formation well into the twentieth century before cosmology took the ground.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 17th century
Same family
cosmoscosmetictheogonygonadcosmopolitan
In a sentence
The lecture compared three cosmogonies and refused to rank them.