The word was first recorded in English in 1567, from French. The translator George Fenton used it in his translation of a collection of tragic tales, describing a man's bad luck.
Italian had already used the word by the end of the thirteenth century, perhaps borrowed from an earlier Occitan word. Behind the Italian form lay two parts, joined together, one of them a prefix meaning 'ill', similar to the English 'mis-'.
The second part of that Italian word was astro, from Latin astrum, from Greek astron, meaning 'star'. That word traces to a Proto-Indo-European root, *ster-, with the same meaning, since an unfavourable position of a star or planet was thought to cause such mishaps or calamities.
STAR and ASTEROID share the same root. STAR is native to Old English, describing a bright ball of burning gas seen as a point of light in the night sky. ASTEROID entered English in 1802, coined by the astronomer William Herschel, from Greek, meaning ‘star-like’.
By the early seventeenth century, William Shakespeare used the word in Hamlet to describe fiery trails and blood-red dew appearing among the stars, taken as omens before a great death. For a time, the word also described any physical ailment, from a bad stomach to a general sickness. By the nineteenth century it had also come to describe anything highly disappointing, from a ruined dinner to an unsuccessful meeting, existing alongside its more serious sense.
