The name Europe comes from the Latin: Europa, which in turn derives from the Greek: Εὐρώπη, from eurys "wide" and ops "face"
(PIE *wer-, "broad" *okw-, "eye").
In Greek mythology Europa was the beautiful daughter of a Phoenician king named Agenor, or Phoenix. As Zeus saw her, he transformed himself into a gentle white bull and approached her and her playing friends. She climbed onto the bull's back and it began to swim off to Crete, where she fell in love with the then-changed-back Zeus and had three sons with him (Minos, Rhadamanthus and Sarpedon, the first two of which constitute, together with Aeacus, the three judges of the underworld).
A less likely possibility proposed by Ernest Klein is that it derives from the ancient Sumerian and Semitic root "Ereb", which carries the meaning of "darkness" or "descent", a reference to the region's western location in relation to Mesopotamia, the Levantine Coast, Anatolia, and the Bosporus. Thus the term would have meant the 'land of the setting of the Sun' or, more generically, 'Western land'.
The term Europe referred once to only a small land area, roughly that part of Thrace that is now part of Turkey. Through the centuries however, it came to denote the whole land mass with which we are familiar today.
Read more about this topic: List Of Continent Name Etymologies
Famous quotes containing the word europe:
“Never before since Jamestown and Plymouth Rock has our American civilization been in such danger as now.... [The Nazis] have made it clear that not only do they intend to dominate all life and thought in their own country, but also to enslave the whole of Europe, and then to use the resources of Europe to dominate the rest of the world.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“When Paris sneezes, Europe catches cold.”
—Prince Metternich (1773–1859)
“All the terrors of the French Republic, which held Austria in awe, were unable to command her diplomacy. But Napoleon sent to Vienna M. de Narbonne, one of the old noblesse, with the morals, manners, and name of that interest, saying, that it was indispensable to send to the old aristocracy of Europe men of the same connection, which, in fact, constitutes a sort of free- masonry. M. de Narbonne, in less than a fortnight, penetrated all the secrets of the imperial cabinet.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)