Myth & LegendGreek → English
Dione
/daɪˈoʊni/noun
A moon of Saturn, and in Greek myth a goddess named in the Iliad as the mother of Aphrodite.
The Greek roots
Διώνη
Diṓnē
Dione, consort of Zeus
Literally: “she of Zeus, the bright sky”
Follow a root:Διώνη1 word
The story of the word
Διώνη is built straight on Διός, the genitive of Ζεύς, and amounts to a female Zeus; at the oracle of Dodona she was worshipped beside him. The root is the oldest in the pantheon, an inherited name for the bright daytime sky that also produced Latin Jupiter, deus and the English deity. Cassini found the moon in 1684 and John Herschel supplied the name in 1847, when he gave Saturn's satellites the Titans as a set.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 1847
Same family
ZeusdeitydivaTuesday
In a sentence
Dione shows long bright cliffs that early images mistook for wisps of cloud.
In the Iliad, Dione comforts her wounded daughter on Olympus.