etymology of easter for src in most languages the feast of the resurrection of our lord is known as the pasch or pasque or some variation thereof a word which comes from the hebrew pesach meaning passover in english german and a few related languages however it is known as easter or some variation thereof and questions have been asked about the origin of this term one explanation is that given by the venerable bede in his de ratione temporum where he derives the word from the name of an anglo saxon goddess of spring called eastre bede is a great scholar and it is natural to take his word for it but he lived and augustine began preaching in kent in the use of the word easter to describe the feast would have been well established before the birth of bede and probably before the birth of anyone he might have discussed the subject with it seems likely that his derivation is just a guess based on his awareness that there had been an anglo saxon goddess of spring bearing that name and the resemblance of the words thus if the said resemblance surely it is not surprising that a personification of spring should have a name similar to the word for dawn is not in istelf convincing the testimony or rather the conjecture by bede does not make it more so assuming that bede was right that would not justify saying that the christian celebration which after all had been going on for some centuries before the name easter was applied to it has pagan roots it would simply mean that the anglo saxons upon becoming christians and beginning to celebrate the resurrection by a festival every spring called it by the name that to them meant simply spring festival however bede s is not the only theory that has been proposed j knoblech in die sprach zeitschrift fuer sprachwissenschaft vienna offers the following derivation among latin speaking christians the week beginning with the feast of the resurrection was known as hebdomada alba white week since the newly baptized christians were accustomed to wear their white baptismal robes throughout that week sometimes the week was referred to simply as albae translaters rendering this into german mistook it for the plural of alba meaning dawn they accordingly rendered it as eostarum which is old high german for dawn this gave rise to the form easter in english yours james kiefer no i m not interested in restarting discussions of the propriety of celebrating easter however this seems like it contains enough interesting information that people might like to see it clh
