Earth & SkyGreek → English
Planetarium
/ˌplænɪˈtɛəriəm/noun
A domed theatre in which images of the night sky are projected onto the ceiling.
The Greek roots
πλανήτης
planḗtēs
wanderer
Literally: “place of the wanderers”
Follow a root:πλανήτης6 words
The story of the word
The Greeks called the planets astēres planētai, wandering stars, because they drifted against the fixed pattern while everything else held station. Planetarium was coined in Latin for the clockwork orreries of the eighteenth century, brass models of that wandering, and only moved to the dome after Zeiss built the first projector in Munich in 1923.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Modern Latin → English
- First recorded
- 18th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
planetplanetaryaplanatic
In a sentence
The planetarium ran the same show at four o'clock every Saturday of my childhood.