Who named the Earth and why did they give it such a dull name?
452276
No specific person named it.\n\nThe English word "earth" has cognates in many modern and ancient languages. Examples in modern tongues include aarde in Dutch and Erde in German. The root also has cognates in extinct languages such as ertha in Old Saxon and ert (meaning "ground") in Middle Irish, derived from the Old English eorðe. All these words are derived from the Proto-Indo-European base *er-. Given metathesis, we can find cognates of "earth" between terra and the modern Romance languages, for instance tierra in Spanish or terra in Portuguese.\n\nSeveral Semitic languages have words for "earth" similar to those in Indo-European languages, although evidence of a link is not overwhelming. Arabic has aard; Akkadian, irtsitu; Aramaic, araa; Phoenician, erets (which appears in the Mesha Stele); and Hebrew, ארץ (arets, or erets when followed by a noun modifier).
328784
The International Astronomical Union (IAU) is officially in charge of assigning astronomical names and it is very sensitive to astronomical tradition.Its nomenclature is often derived from tradition and history (especially Greek/Roman mythology) rather than from what might today seem more sensible.
251098
You can probably search up all those questions on google or something. But I think Venus got it's name from the Roman/Greek God Venus.
512373
why is the sky called the sky?
1088
Other than the fact that venus is a goddess and mars is a god, I think the main reason was a marketing decision. The book which coined the expression was originally titled:\n\n"The Women are from Venus, the Men are from Uranus"\n\nBut then again, they thought it might be subject to some juvenile pranks. So they switched to Mars. Which is closer to earth, but not as close to the point as Uranus.
647693
lots :-)  Let me figure it out...\n\nFirst the number is spelled 'googol' and is equal to 10^100 (1 followed by 100 zeroes).\n\nA year nominally has 31,556,926 seconds (365.242199 days x 24 hours x 60 minutes x 60 seconds).  I used the number 365.242199 because that is how long it takes for the earth to go once around the sun... we round this to 365 and add an additional day every 4 years (with some exceptions 3 out of every 4 centuries, blah, blah, blah)...\n\nAnyway, I digress.  Back to the problem at hand.\n\n10 x 10^99 / 3.1556926 x 10^7 = (10/3.1556926) x 10^92\n\n3.16887646 × 10^92 years.  There is no English name for this word but it is *lots* like I said at the beginning.  :-)\n\nThe closest I can get to a name would be to use vigintillion (10^63) as a base and go from there...\n\n3.16887646 x 10^29 x 10^63 or\n\n316 x 10^27 x 10^63 +\n887 x 10^24 x 10^63 +\n646 x 10^21 x 10^63\n\nSo that would be:\n316 octillion-vigintillion, 887 septillion-vigintillion, 646 sextillion-vigintillion years\n\nOkay, a little more research and I found that my names were close but not exactly correct.  This number should be called:\n  \n316 octovigintillion 887 septenvigintillion 646 sexvigintillion years!
94204
God created Earth and it underwent some processes.\nGenerally people use the theory of Big Bang.\n\nBased on my observations, this type of question is most likely to get little response.\nWhy?\nBecause people do not know about how Earth was really created. So do I.
624977
Uranus was the first planet to be discovered that was not known in ancient times; although it had been observed on many previous occasions, it was always mistakenly identified as a star. The earliest recorded sighting was in 1690 when John Flamsteed catalogued it as 34 Tauri. Flamsteed observed Uranus twice again. Sir William Herschel formally discovered the planet on March 13, 1781, but reported it on April 26, 1781, as a "comet."\n\nHerschel originally named it Georgium Sidus (George's Star) in honour of King George III of Great Britain. When it was pointed out that sidus means star and not planet, he rebaptised it the Georgian Planet. This name was not acceptable outside of Britain. Lalande proposed in 1784 to name it Herschel, at the same time that he created the planet's symbol ("a globe surmounted by your initial"); his proposal was readily adopted by French astronomers. Prosperin, of Uppsala, proposed the names Astraea, Cybele, and Neptune (now borne by two asteroids and a planet). Lexell, of St. Petersburg, compromised with George III's Neptune and Great-Britain's Neptune. Bernoulli, from Berlin, suggested Hypercronius and Transaturnis. Lichtenberg, from Göttingen, chimed in with Austräa, a goddess mentioned by Ovid (but who is traditionally associated with Virgo). The name Minerva was also proposed. Finally, Bode, as editor of the Berliner Astronomisches Jahrbuch, opted for Uranus, after Latinized version of the Greek god of the sky, Ouranos; Maximilian Hell followed suit by using it in the first ephemeris, published in Vienna. Examination of earliest issues of Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society from 1827 shows that the name Uranus was already the most common name used even by British astronomers by then, and probably earlier. The name Georgium Sidus or "the Georgian" were still used infrequently (by the British alone) thereafter. The final holdout was HM Nautical Almanac Office, which did not switch to Uranus until 1850.\n\nIn the Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese languages, the planet's name is literally translated as the sky king star (天王星).\n\nHope that's not too long for you!!\n\nP.S. I don't believe your claim that a professor wants a paper on a Saturday. I think you're curious, and impatient, and wanted to know sooner rather than later. It's OK to be curious as long as you own up to it. I'm not saying I'm sure you were lying, but I've got a hunch. Just don't be self-conscious about wanting information.
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The name of our planet is the Earth. The name of our moon is the Moon. The name of our solar system is the Solar System. \n\nNotice that I capitalize them, because when used as names, they are proper nouns. This also helps us distinguish between the planet Earth and earth (meaning soil), between the Earth's Moon and moon (meaning the natural satellite of a planet), and between our Solar System and any other solar systems (since any system containing a star and a planet or a planet-forming disk can be called a solar system.) \n\nThis is the usage approved by the International Astronomical Union, the body in charge of naming celestial objects. It may seem odd that these important objects don't have names, but if you think about it, it just reinforces their importance. For example, the Moon is the Moon, not just any moon. It requires no other name, because it's the most important moon! \n\nYou may read or hear people using Luna for the Moon, or Terra or Gaia for the Earth, or Sol for the Sun, but these are poetic terms, often seen in science fiction stories, but not used by astronomers in scientific writing.
1163829
I would name the planet Bob.\n\nBob would be a great name for a planet for the following reasons:\n\nIt's short, and all schoolkids would be able to spell it.\n\nThere's no way to turn it into a stupid joke about your anus.\n\nIt's dyslexic friendly.\n\nIt sounds the same in every language.\n\nEveryone would like Bob, because Bob's your uncle!
472142
I read somewhere that Amerigo Vespucci authored a very popular map of the new world, but nobody knew what the interior of the continents looked like so he had to leave that area blank...and inasmuch as he had all that open space to work with, he placed his name very prominently in the middle of the continental area.  Other people saw the name and assumed it was the name of the land (and not the author) and started calling it America as a result.  So essentially it was a mistake.
655683
I believe the name "Earth" is derived from Latin. The ancient Greeks however considered earth a goddess naming her Ge or Gaeia in English translation. They still use the name today for earth in their language.
137574
According the the Bible over 4000 BC,a Giant race romed the Earth they were called the Annunaki,and in some of the Bible codes the Annunaki also was mentioned,the planet called Nibiru is in motion to our solar system as it dose every 3600 yrs or so,is where they are from..(Crazy or what?) anyways the closes time to earth is in 2012.\nMy Mother and Uncle would tell me these wired things.\nBut as a warning..
993488
AUSTRALIA\nThe name Australia is derived from the Latin australis, meaning southern. Legends of an "unknown southern land" (terra australis incognita) date back to the Roman times, and were commonplace in mediæval geography, but were not based on any actual knowledge of the continent. The Dutch adjectival form Australische ("Australian", in the sense of "southern") was used by Dutch officials in Batavia to refer to the newly discovered land to the south as early as 1638."\n\nASIA\n"The word Asia entered English via Latin from Ancient Greek, first attested in Herodotus, where it refers to Asia Minor, or for the purposes of the Persian Wars, to the Persian Empire as opposed to Greece and Egypt. Homer knows a Trojan ally named Asios, son of Hyrtacus, a ruler over several towns, and also describes a marsh as 461).\nThe Greek term was likely from Assuwa, a 14th century BC confederation of states in ancient Anatolia. Hittite assu- "good" is a likely element in that name. Elamites numeous in the east called themselves As, and at least one Aryan people on the central Eurasian steppes called themselves Asi. Alternatively, the ultimate etymology of the term may be from the Akkadian word asu, which means "to go out" or "to rise", referring to the direction of the sun at sunrise in the Middle East. Compare to this the suggestion for the etymology of Europe from Semitic erebu "to set". The motives for the names of Asia and Europe would thus mirror each other, much like the terms orient and occident (the names Anatolia and Levant likewise signify "sunrise"). This suggestion is widely quoted, but it suffers from the fact that Anatolia from an Akkadian or generally Semitic perspective does not lie in the east."\n\nAFRICA\n"The name Africa came into Western use through the Romans, who used the name Africa terra — "land of the Afri" (plural, or "Afer" singular) — for the northern part of the continent, as the province of Africa with its capital Carthage, corresponding to modern-day Tunisia.\nThe origin of Afer may either come from: the Phoenician `afar, dust; \nthe Afri, a tribe—possibly Berber—who dwelt in North Africa in the Carthage area; \nthe Greek word aphrike, meaning without cold (see also List of traditional Greek place names); \nor the Latin word aprica, meaning sunny. \nThe historian Leo Africanus (1495-1554) attributed the origin to the Greek word phrike (meaning "cold and horror"), combined with the negating prefix a-, so meaning a land free of cold and horror. But the change of sound from ph to f in Greek is datable to about the first century, so this cannot really be the origin of the name.\n\nEgypt was considered part of Asia by the ancients, and first assigned to Africa by the geographer Ptolemy (85 - 165 AD), who accepted Alexandria as Prime Meridian and made the isthmus of Suez and the Red Sea the boundary between Asia and Africa. As Europeans came to understand the real extent of the continent, the idea of Africa expanded with their knowledge\n\nEUROPE\n"In Greek mythology, Europa was a Phoenician princess who was abducted by Zeus in bull form and taken to the island of Crete, where she gave birth to Minos. For Homer, Europa was a mythological queen of Crete, not a geographical designation. Later Europa stood for mainland Greece and by 500 BC its meaning was extended to lands to the north."\n\nTHE AMERICAS:\n"The earliest known use of the name America for the continents of the Americas dates from 1507. It appears on a globe and a large map created by the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller in Saint-Dié-des-Vosges. An accompanying book, Cosmographiae Introductio, explains that the name was derived from the Latinized version of the explorer Amerigo Vespucci's name, Americus Vespucius, in its feminine form, America, as the other continents all have Latin feminine na
871004
Ancient civilizations knew this. Observations of lunar eclipses, plus the fact that the horizon is at equal distances no matter what direction we look made this pretty obvious. The earliest were probably the Assyrians or Babylonians, who developed the first coherent astronomical systems (claims by people that the natives of India were first notwithstanding)\n\nThe issue was not the shape of the earth, but its size, and its place in the scheme of things (at the center or off to the side.) It took thousands of years to displace the earth conceptually from the center of creation to a planet orbiting a star, which was then displaced from the center of the universe to a position in an outlying arm of our galaxy, which itself was displaced from being the entire universe to being the largest galaxy and at the center of the universe to being just another galaxy among billions. So we're just a bunch of hicks from the sticks.
46491
A long time ago in human history, people thought that Earth was flat, and at the universe's center. They believed that seven members of the solar system forever circled around us—see graphic to the right, or view one from Censorinus - Sur le jour natal. \n\n     Some Mediterranian peoples also believed that each hour of the day was ruled by either the Sun, Moon or one of five then-known planets, all of which were thought of as gods. The sequence in which they thought hours were governed was the inverse order of distance they believed those solar system objects to be from Earth. \n\nDuring this time, Egyptians thought that the most distant was Saturn, shown at the bottom of the graphic above. They thought that the order of closer members (shown counterclockwise following Saturn) was Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury and closest, the Moon. So they believed that the first hour was ruled by Saturn, the second by Jupiter and so on. \n     Egyptians also believed that after each seven hours the order in which these objects ruled was repeated, so it started again with Saturn. \n     According to those ancient Egyptians, the planet that ruled the first hour also governed the entire twenty-four hour period, and gave its name to that day.    The first (and also the 8th, 15th and 22nd) hours of the first day were sacred to Saturn, the 23rd to Jupiter, the 24th to Mars and the first hour of the next day to the Sun. Therefore, they believed that the first day was ruled by and named after Saturn (Saturday) and the second was ruled by (and named after) the Sun (Sunday). \n\nEgyptians once divided all twelve 30-day months (of their 360-day calendar year) into three 10-day weeks in the same manner as Greeks of the same period.    The epoch at which planet worship caused them to change its length to seven days is not known, but it must have been over twenty-five hundred years ago because Herodotus, writing in his History during the 5th century B.C. said: "Here are some other discoveries of the Egyptians. They find...each day belongs to a god..." \n     Adherents of the cult of Sin at Harran, who were known as Harranians or Sabeans by Arabic and Syrian authors, named their days after the same solar system members  as Egyptians and Persians. Like Hebrews and many other peoples, they considered the one named after Saturn to be the seventh day, so they began their week with a day named after the Sun. All seven days were named after solar system members in the same order as they were in Egypt. \n\nIt is interesting to note that these exact same solar system objects, and in the same sequence, were also used to name days in ancient India, Tibet and Burma.   This is also true of names for Japanese days of the week, but the custom there has been traced back only a thousand years.  \n     Roman soldiers stationed in Egypt became accustomed to the pagan seven-day week and began to introduce it into their own homeland to replace their eight-day marketing week. Octavian (Caesar Augustus) and succeeding Roman rulers permitted this practice but it wasn't made official until the emperor Constantine took that step in A.D. 321. \n     English names for days of the week are derived from Anglo-Saxon names for those same seven heavenly bodies that were revered by ancient peoples. Compare those English and Anglo-Saxon day names in the table below. Other similarities between day and "planet" names in various countries can be observed there.
432624
our easy lies earth is stupid