Earth & SkyGreek → English
Eon
/ˈiːɒn/noun
An immense stretch of time, and in geology the largest formal division, ranking above the era.
The Greek roots
αἰών
aiṓn
age, lifetime
Literally: “a lifetime, an age”
Follow a root:αἰών2 words
The story of the word
In Homer αἰών is a person's own span of life, close to a life force: when it leaves the body, the man is dead. Gnostic writers of the second century turned Aeons into emanated divine beings, plural and named. Geologists then made it a measured unit, so the Phanerozoic Eon now means a specific 539 million years rather than a vague forever.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 1640s
In a sentence
Bacteria had the planet to themselves for eons before anything grew a shell.