Hello internet.

In my last video about Pluto, you may have noticed that I said aloud the names of every planet except one, this one. And that was no accident, but rather the result of careful script editing, because where I grew up, I learned that the name of the seventh planet is pronounced Uranus. Of course, to a kid, Uranus sounds an awful lot like Uranus, which is how I and everyone else I knew ended up saying the name,

which is funny when you're a child but becomes a bit of a problem when you grow up and try to teach scientific facts about the planet.

For example, Uranus has a ring around it. Astronomers have discovered a dark spot on Uranus.

Uranus is a gas giant, Uranus is surrounded by methane.

There is a solution to this problem, the alternative pronunciation of the name which goes,

Uranus.

And most scientists in public roles do use this pronunciation.

But for me, Uranus is still problematic.

Sure, it's better than Uranus, but it's still Uranus.

And perhaps I'm just childish, but when someone else says Uranus, I still hear

Uranus in my head and it just draws more attention to the unfortunate name.

The tragedy is, it didn't have to be this way.

The seventh planet from the Sun is unique because it's the first planet we discovered.

For all of human history, the six closest planets were big enough or bright enough to see with just our limited simian eyes.

But the next planet was too dim to see until our telescope technology got good enough for British astronomer William Herschel to spot it in 1781. Understandably, though, he didn't think he'd discovered a new planet since, from the rise of modern humans 50,000 years earlier until that Tuesday, no one ever had. But discover it he did, and so choose a name he must. And Herschel, being the good subject of the crown that he was, christened his new planet, the Georgian Cytis, which means the Georgian star. And the George in that Georgian star was King George III, the reigning monarch. While King George liked the name, the rest of the world did not, and decided that perhaps Herschel wasn't the best guy to name the new planet after all,

and quickly decided to come up with alternatives of their own. One suggestion was Neptune, which is confusing to us now, but at the time, the planet that would become Neptune had not yet been found. A more obvious alternative was to name the planet Herschel after the man who discovered it. Even in Great Britain, the name the Georgium Cytus proved a bit stuffy for some,

so variants like the Georgian planet or just Georgian were also used. Though never, as you might have heard, George. Side note here, while researching this video, I found a lot of websites claiming that the seventh planet was almost named George, but I was never able to find a primary source for this. As best I could tell, searching through documents from the time, no one ever suggested this name. I checked with the Royal Institution, who, since 1799, has been promoting science awesomeness from the heart of London and whose videos you should now go watch, and they confirm the name George was never on the table because to so casually refer to the king at the time would have been disrespectful, and disrespecting a monarch is never a good idea,

especially one who is slowly losing his mind from a genetic disorder, but that's a story for another time.

Anyway, another real suggestion for the new planet's name came from Johann Bode, who suggested the Greek god of the sky.

When a colleague of Bode discovered the 92nd element in 1789, he named it uranium to support Bowd's choice and try and end the debate. Perhaps because these two were German, it might not have occurred to them how the word would eventually be corrupted in English. Though it's also hard to know how English speakers in the 1780s and 90s would have pronounced the name. But since the word anus was in the language then, it seems unlikely that this particular

pronunciation would have been popular. It may also have been pronounced with a flat A to sound like

...