Earth & SkyGreek → English
Europa
/jʊˈroʊpə/noun
The smoothest of Jupiter's four large moons, an ice shell with a probable ocean beneath it.
The Greek roots
εὐρύς
eurýs
wide, broad
ὤψ
ṓps
face, eye
Literally: “broad face”
The story of the word
Simon Marius named the four big moons in 1614 after lovers of Zeus, following a suggestion from Kepler; Galileo, who had found them, insisted on calling them I through IV, and the numbers held for two centuries. Europa in myth is the Phoenician princess Zeus carries to Crete in the shape of a bull. The broad-faced reading of her name is the ancient one, though many scholars now suspect a Semitic source and compare Akkadian erebu, to go down or set.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 1614
Same family
EuropeEuropeanautopsymyopia
In a sentence
Europa has fewer craters than almost anything else in the solar system, which means its surface is young.