Myth & LegendGreek → English
Gaia
/ˈɡaɪə/proper noun
The Greek earth-goddess, and the name of the hypothesis that Earth's life and its physical systems work as one self-regulating whole.
The Greek roots
Γαῖα
Gaîa
earth, the earth-goddess
Literally: “earth”
Follow a root:Γαῖα1 word
The story of the word
In Hesiod she appears second after Chaos and produces the sky by herself, with no one to father it. James Lovelock needed a name for his hypothesis that life and chemistry regulate each other planet-wide, and his neighbour, the novelist William Golding, supplied this one. Her other Greek form, γῆ, is the one that built geography, geology and geometry, the measuring of land.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → English
Same family
geographygeologygeometrygeode
In a sentence
The Gaia hypothesis took thirty years to move from ridicule to reading list.