Science

Planet

from Greek planetes, "wanderers"
A large body orbiting a star.
Documented

The wandering stars

Greek astronomers watched most stars hold fixed patterns while a few bright points wandered across the sky: planetes asteres, wandering stars. The Sun and Moon counted as planets then. The word kept the name long after the wandering was explained as orbits.

Assessment: Fully documented, and a reminder that categories often encode outdated observations.
Stories

The wanderers ruled fate

Because they moved differently, the planets became the machinery of astrology: each wanderer assigned a temperament, a metal, a day of the week. Saturday, Sunday, and Monday still carry Saturn, Sun, and Moon in English.

Assessment: Astrology's premises are not supported by evidence, but its vocabulary is genuinely fossilized in your calendar.
Interesting claims

The sky remembers a different arrangement

The catastrophist claim: the word wanderer preserves a memory of when planets visibly misbehaved, changing course, growing hair as comets, battling in the sky, and every mythology's war in heaven is the record. Planets are called wanderers because they once wandered further.

Assessment: Planets still wander, measurably, against the fixed stars, and that fully explains the name. The deeper claim belongs on the Worlds in Collision card, where it stands or falls with the physics. The word cannot testify to cataclysm.
Sources and further reading
  1. OED, planet, from Greek planetes, wanderer
  2. Plato, Timaeus 38c-e, the wandering stars
Worth asking

We named a class of worlds after our own confusion about them. What are we misnaming today out of the same confusion?

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GR8YFILES · competing origin stories, labeled by the strength of their evidence · readers 14+