The modern English word "Earth" developed, via Middle English, from an Old English noun most often spelled '. It has cognates in every Germanic language, and their ancestral root has been reconstructed as . In its earliest attestation, the word "eorðe" was already being used to translate the many senses of Latin ' and Greek "gē": the ground, its soil, dry land, the human world, the surface of the world (including the sea), and the globe itself. As with Roman Terra/Tellūs and Greek Gaia, Earth may have been a personified goddess in Germanic paganism: late Norse mythology included Jörð ('Earth'), a giantess often given as the mother of Thor.