Myth & LegendGreek → English
Rhea
/ˈriːə/proper noun
The Titaness who saved the infant Zeus from his father, and the name of Saturn's second-largest moon.
The Greek roots
Ῥέα
Rhéa
Rhea, mother of the gods
Literally: “flowing one, by ancient guesswork”
Follow a root:Ῥέα1 word
The story of the word
Kronos swallowed his children as they were born, so Rhea handed him a stone in swaddling clothes and hid the baby in a Cretan cave. Ancient writers tied her name to rhéō, to flow, and modern scholarship has not improved on that guess. John Herschel proposed the name for the moon in 1847, and the big flightless South American bird carries it too, from a naturalist's whim rather than any resemblance.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
In a sentence
Cassini found a thin oxygen atmosphere around Rhea, produced by radiation splitting the surface ice.