English Words With Origins in Ancient Greek Mythology

The English language is the most extensive language in the world, providing its users with more than 170,000 potentially employable words, but, like other languages, it has been infused with antique terms, many of them derived from ancient Greek mythology.

From ‘atlas’ to ‘zephyr’, many words that now form part of the English lexicon have their origins in ancient Greek mythology, with gods, heroes, and tyrants unknowingly passing on their names through the centuries to be soaked up into everyday English vocabulary.

It is important to note that, since the living Greek and English languages were not in direct contact until modern times, borrowings were necessarily indirect, coming either through Latin (texts or French or other vernaculars), or from ancient Greek texts – so, here are a few of the most interesting examples.

English Words with Origins in Greek Mythology

Atlas is perhaps one of the best-known figures of ancient Greek mythology: the Titan whose punishment – for leading the Titan rebellion against Zeus in the Titanomachy – was to stand at the western edge of the Earth and hold the heavens on his shoulders for eternity.

But the use of the word ‘atlas’ in a geographical context is dated to roughly 1595, when the German-Flemish geographer Gerardus Mercator published ‘Atlas or Cosmographical meditations upon the creation of the universe and the universe as created’. This lengthy title encompasses Mercator’s definition of the word as a description of the creation and form of the whole universe, not solely as a collection of maps.

The volume which was released one year after his death is a text with broad scope but, as the editions evolved, it regressed into simply a collection of maps, and it is with this meaning that the term was used from the middle of the 17th century.

The new word coined by Mercator was a token of his respect for the Titan Atlas, whom he considered to be the first great geographer.

Even such everyday words as ‘charity’ have their germ in ancient Greek mythology. Through a convoluted route, the word as it is now used in English, likely has its roots in the mythological tale of the Charities, or singular, Charis. The latter is a Greek word meaning ‘grace’, and is employed in the New Testament of the Bible.

In ancient Greek mythology, the Charities were three or more goddesses of charm, beauty, nature, creativity, goodwill, and fertility. Their number varied greatly depending on who was referring to them. In Hesiod’s Theogony, the Charities are listed as Aglaea, Euphrosyne, and Thalia, but alternate names to those given by Hesiod include Damia, Auxesia, Cleta, Hegemone, Peitho, Kale and many more.

Such salacious words as ‘erotic’ also find their origins in ancient Greek mythology, with the god of love Eros bearing the fruit that would eventually ripen into the fairly commonly-used English word. In fact, the ancient Greeks categorized love into four components: erao, to be in love with, to desire passionately or sexually, phileo, to have affection for, agapao, to have regard for, and stergo, which was used to describe the love of parents and their children or a ruler and his, or her subjects.

Even the world’s second-smallest continent, Europe, is believed to be derived from the name of a princess in ancient Greek mythology: Europa. However, it may also come from combining the Greek roots eur- (wide) and -op (seeing) to form the phrase ‘wide-gazing’.

In ancient Greek mythology, Europa was a Phoenician princess from Tyre, modern-day Lebanon, and the mother of King Minos of Crete. The story of her abduction by Zeus in the form of a bull was a Cretan tale, being that most of the love stories involving Zeus originated from more ancient tales describing his marriages with goddesses.

The earliest literary reference to Europa can be found in Homer’s Iliad, which is commonly dated to the 8th century BC. Another early reference to her is in a fragment of the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women, discovered at Oxyrhynchus, and the earliest vase painting identifiable as Europa dates from the mid-seventh century BC.

The myth of the ancient Greek god Hermaphroditus is the root word for another term employed in modern-day English: hermaphrodite. Hermaphroditus was the son of Aphrodite and Hermes, and, according to Ovid, a nymph named Salmacis fell in love with Hermaphroditus and prayed that she could be united with him. Her prayers were answered, and her body fused with his, resulting in one individual possessing physical traits of both male and female sexes.

The word hermaphrodite in modern English has kept the core of the Greek myth in its meaning: a person or animal that exhibits physical characteristics of both genders. The word entered the English lexicon as early as the late 14th century, and though it is not entirely known, it seems to have come via Latin, in John Trevisa’s 1398 translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus’ De Proprietatibus rerum (On the properties of things).

An even rarer word in modern-day English, ‘lycanthrope’, which describes someone who is half man, half wolf (werewolf), comes from the ancient Greek myth of Lycaon, a king of Arcadia who killed and cooked his son Nyctimus and served him to Zeus, to see whether the leader of the gods was sufficiently all-knowing to recognize human flesh. Disgusted, Zeus transformed Lycaon into a wolf and killed his offspring; Nyctimus was then brought back to life.

Music, a word that denotes one of the most beautiful mediums of art ever created, comes directly from the Muses; the inspirational Greek goddesses of literature, science, and the arts. They were considered the source of the knowledge embodied in the poetry, lyric songs, and myths that were related orally for centuries in ancient Greek culture.

The number and names of the Muses differed by region, but from the Classical period the number of Muses was standardized to nine, and their names were generally given as Calliope, Clio, Polyhymnia, Euterpe, Terpsichore, Erato, Melpomene, Thalia, and Urania.

A now-waning phrase in the English language – ‘memory is the mother of the Muses’ – is also a throwback to ancient Greek mythology. The mother of the Muses was a Titaness named Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory. Her name is where we get the modern-day word ‘mnemonic’ from, which is a tool to help with memorization. The word ‘muse’ too, meaning a literal person or supernatural force that serves as someone’s source of artistic inspiration, is derived from the Muses of ancient Greek mythology.

The large bodies of saltwater surrounding the land masses of our planet may be so-named because of Oceanus, the Titan son of Uranus and Gaia in ancient Greek mythology.

Oceanus was the husband of his sister, the Titan Tethys, and the father of the river gods and the Oceanids, as well as being the great river that encircled the entire world.

Another ancient Greek tale involving a father trying to feed his son to Zeus has given rise to the word ‘tantalize’, meaning to arrest someone with irresistible temptation which will never be fulfilled.

Tantalus was a figure in ancient Greek mythology, most famous for his punishment in Tartarus – for trying to trick the gods into eating his son, he was made to stand in a pool of water beneath a fruit tree with low branches, with the fruit ever eluding his grasp, and the water always receding before he could take a drink. This is where the word tantalize originates from.

It would make sense that some of the elements were given anthropomorphic properties and turned into gods in ancient times, being that the explanations we have today for natural phenomena like thunderstorms, lightning, rain, earthquakes, and tides, had not been brought into the realm of science and human understanding back then.

In modern-day English, a ‘zephyr’ is a gentle west wind (made famous by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers), but this weather pattern in ancient Greece was assigned to Zephyrus, the god and personification of the west wind.

There are many, many more words in the English language that find their origins in the lexicon of ancient Greek mythology, most of which hold a meaning that is exemplified in the myth itself, such as with the case of Hermaphroditus.