Myth & LegendGreek → English
Io
/ˈaɪoʊ/proper noun
The priestess whom Zeus turned into a heifer to hide her, and the innermost of Jupiter's four large moons.
The Greek roots
Ἰώ
Iṓ
Io, priestess of Hera
Literally: “a name with no agreed sense”
Follow a root:Ἰώ1 word
The story of the word
Hera saw through the disguise and sent a gadfly to drive the cow across the world, and the ancients read her route off the map: the Ionian Sea and the Bosporus, which is Greek for ox-crossing, were both explained by her wandering. Her name itself has no accepted derivation, which is unusual for a figure this old. The moon named after her carries some four hundred active volcanoes, more than anywhere else known, squeezed by a tug-of-war between Jupiter and the neighbouring moons.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
In a sentence
Voyager 1 caught a plume rising 300 kilometres off the edge of Io in 1979.