Myth & LegendGreek → English
Eris
/ˈɛrɪs/noun
The Greek goddess of discord, and the dwarf planet beyond Neptune named after her in 2006.
The Greek roots
Ἔρις
Éris
strife, discord
Literally: “strife”
Follow a root:Ἔρις1 word
The story of the word
Eris was left off the wedding guest list and threw in a golden apple marked for the fairest, which set Hera, Athena and Aphrodite quarrelling and ended in the Trojan War. The astronomers who found the object in 2005 chose the name with some self-awareness: it was slightly larger than Pluto, and the argument it caused ended with Pluto demoted to dwarf planet. Its moon is Dysnomia, lawlessness, Eris's daughter in Hesiod.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 2006
Same family
eristicDysnomia
In a sentence
Eris takes about 560 years to complete one orbit.
The apple of Eris is where the phrase bone of contention effectively starts.