Where did the word 'moon' come from?
Earth has just one moon. It is best known as the Moon in the English-speaking world because people in ancient times used the Moon to measure the passing of the months. The word 'moon' can be traced to the word mona, an old English word from mediaeval times. Mona shares its origins with the Latin words metri, which means to measure, and mensis, which means month. So we see that the Moon is called the Moon because it is used to measure the months. But why do the moons around other planets have names, while ours is just the Moon?
When the Moon was named, people only knew about our Moon. That all changed in 1610 when an Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei discovered what we now know are the four largest moons of Jupiter. Other astronomers across Europe discovered five moons around Saturn during the 1600s. These objects became known as moons because they were close to their planets, just as our own Moon is close to Earth. It’s fair to say that other moons are named after our own Moon. The newly discovered moons were each given beautiful names to identify them among the growing number of planets and moons astronomers were finding in the Solar System.
