It is odd that we use earth as soil and as our place of existence - the planet we live on. It seems strange that we didn't "reserve" the name of our planet. We did that with the other planets.
My thinking is reversed. We should look at how things evolved. The name Earth comes from English/German which means the ground. The Old English words 'eor(th)e and 'earth' or in German 'erde'.
One site says: "Earth has different names in different languages. It’s called ‘terra’ in Portuguese, ‘dünya’ in Turkish and ‘aarde’ in Dutch, just to name a few with their own etymology. However, the common thread in all languages is that they were all derived from the same meaning in their origins, which is ‘ ground’ or ‘soil’."
Sciencefocus says: The Greeks and Romans named most of the planets in the Solar System after particular gods, and we have kept those names in English. Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, all unknown in classical times, were named by the modern astronomers who discovered them, but still after Greek and Roman gods.
So Earth is the one exception. Its name, according to the official gazetteer of planetary discovery, comes from the Indo-European base ‘er’, which produced the Germanic noun ‘ertho’, the modern German ‘erde’, Dutch ‘aarde’, Danish and Swedish ‘jord’, and English ‘earth’.
Livescience says: One interesting fact about its name: Earth is the only planet that wasn't named after a Greek or Roman god or goddess.
And we don't know who first used the world for the planet. A mystery.
