Etymon #4
Spilled across sky
The word entered English in the late fourteenth century, borrowed from Old French and ultimately from a Greek source. Its earliest English use named something familiar to every medieval observer, visible to anyone who looked up on a clear night. The Greek source carried a specific meaning more striking than the modern sense suggests.
In Chaucer's House of Fame, composed around 1380, the narrator dreams of being carried through the heavens by a golden eagle sent by Jupiter. The eagle offers to show him features of the sky, and in that passage Chaucer reaches for the new Greek-derived word. Before reaching English, the word had travelled from a Greek source through Late Latin and Old French, carrying a specific everyday meaning.
The Greek source word was an adjective meaning milky, formed from the noun gala, meaning milk. The full Greek phrase named the milky circle of starlight that medieval observers saw stretching across the heavens. The largest structure visible in the night sky was named, by the ancient Greeks, for the likeness to milk.
The same root produced descendants in Latin and through Latin into English. LACTOSE, the sugar found in milk, descends directly from the Latin word for milk. LETTUCE, the salad leaf, takes its name from the Latin lactuca, the milky plant, named for the white sap that runs from its stems when broken. The cosmic word and the salad leaf share a single ancient root for milk.
