Names for Earth

Here are three linguistic facts about Earth!

1. The word for “human” in many languages descends from the word for “earth”, as in an “earthling”. Among these types of earth-based human words include:

  • The Latin “hūmānus” which is actually where we get “human”. It’s cognate to the soil type of “humus”.
  • The Hebrew אָדָם (adám), which is where we get the name Adam.

2. Many languages from Europe and beyond agree on the names of the planets, since they’re based off the names of Roman or Greek deities:

However, the word for “Earth” is highly variable among them, since it mostly depends on each language’s word for “ground”, “soil”, or “land”:

3. And, for the last fun fact, there are over 7,000 languages on… EARTH!

For more linguistics content, be sure to subscribe my YouTube channel!

Thanks for reading these linguistic facts about Earth!