English star, German Stern, Italian and Latin stella, Greek αστηρ (astēr) and Hindi तारा (tārā), all started with an agricultural metaphor. They are derived from the Indo-European root for to strew, which is reflected in Sanskrit as स्तृ (stṛ). The use of this root in the formation of the word designating the heavenly bodies must have started off as a conscious comparison, on the part of the earliest speakers of Indo-European, between the seed they scattered over their earthly fields and the glittering seeds they imagined the gods to scatter over the immortal meadows of heaven.

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