Is our planets official name Terra or Earth?
In English the proper name is the Earth. Terra is the Latin name but is not a universal ‘official’ name in English or any other language. Some countries use the Latin name sometimes with local variations like La Terre in French just as we have Latin names brought into our own language for some things, but for the Earth we have our name for it from the Proto-Norse word ‘erd’ which is also used in German as Der Erde….The Earth. That came from the Proto-Indo-European word root ‘ -er’ and became ‘iere’ in Friesian, ‘ear’ in Old English, and ‘ur’ in Old Irish. In Latin it became prefixed with a ‘T’ to make Terra but not in the northern European languages. An ‘erd-house’ (earth-house) marked on an ancient Shetland Islands map shows that the use of the word word ‘erd’ there may have come with the Vikings during their settlements on those islands in the 8thC AD.
In English, the official name of our planet is Earth (with a capital E) — it is the name used in all modern English-language scientific papers where the author needs to mention our planet. The name comes from an old Nordic-language word that means home, the land where one grows food. It is, of course, the same language root as the word earth (small e) which means the soil. In the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance, scientists used to write to each other in Latin, so they used Latin versions of the names for planets. That is how the other names (Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, etc.) became popular. However, Terra, Luna and Sol never really caught on as names in English (but they did serve to create adjectives such as terrestrial, lunar and solar). Similarly, Moon (capital M) is the official name our our satellite. It comes from an old Latin word which also gives us the word “month” which originally meant the period covering the entire cycle of the Moon’s appearance (for example, from New
