Earth & SkyGreek → English
Tethys
/ˈtiːθɪs/noun
A mid-sized icy moon of Saturn, and the name of the ancient ocean that once separated Laurasia from Gondwana.
The Greek roots
Τηθύς
Tēthýs
Tethys, sea Titaness
Literally: “the sea nurse (uncertain)”
Follow a root:Τηθύς1 word
The story of the word
Τηθύς is a Titaness, wife of Oceanus and, in Hesiod, mother of every river on earth. John Herschel handed her name to a moon of Saturn in 1847; Eduard Suess gave it in 1893 to the vanished sea whose floor now stands up as the Alps and the Himalaya. The Greek name has no settled etymology, though it has long been connected with τήθη, grandmother, and with a word for a sea creature.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 1847
Same family
TethyanOceanusTitan
In a sentence
Limestone full of Tethys fossils sits two miles up the mountainside.
Cassini photographed a crater on Tethys nearly half the width of the moon itself.