Question: who made the names of the planets ?

Laurence Perreault Levasseur answered on 18 Jun 2014:

For the 5 planets that are easily visible with the naked eye (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn), that depends a lot on the language. This is because they have been observed by many civilizations throughout the history of humankind, and so have been named differently by different cultures.

In English, the names come from the Roman gods, who themselves took the gods from the ancient Greeks (they just changed their names, but kept the mythology). They named the planets according to what they looked like. For example, Mars is red, a very aggressive colour, and was named after the god of war. Venus, on the other side, appears very bright and so was named after the goddess of beauty.

In Chinese, these planets are named after the names of the 5 basic elements according to the mythology.

Earth is a bit different in English, the name comes from germanic and old english (but it’s definitely very old).

For the two last planets, Neptune and Uranus, they were discovered much later.

Herschel, who discovered Uranus, wanted to name it after Geroge III, while other astronomers wanted to call it simply ‘Herschel’. Some astronomers wanted to name it Uranus to respect the tradition of naming planets after mythological figures. It took until 1850 before that name became widely used.

Neptune, on the other hand, was predicted to exist before it was discovered. It took a while for astronomers to decide how to name it, but scientists eventually settled for Neptune.

Pluto (even though it’s not a planet anymore, I still like him so I’ll include him here 🙂 ), discovered in 1930, was actually named by an 11-years-old from Oxford. I think people like the idea because Pluto is so cold and far away, it makes sense to name it after the god of the underworld.