https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Isaac-Newton-name-gravity
He wanted to be able to talk about it without having to say “that thing where everything is attracted to everything else” all the time. That would get tiresome.
It’s the same reason anyone names anything.
I am unsure that Newton actually named the phenomenon “gravity”. The word he uses in Principia is “gravitation”… the phenomena associated with things falling down and having weight.
Why that name?
Basically, he was explaining the phenomenon of weight … which is “gravis” in Latin. In his day, if you wanted something to sound smart and sciencey, you used Latin. “Gravitation” was already well accepted… what he did was explain it in terms of a force acting at a distance, which allowed him to use his Laws of Motion to make predictions.
So if you had invented Z’forces” as a way to explain non-uniform motion, and you had just proposed that gravitation works through the action of such a force, what would you call that force?
Weight … gravis … gravity.
Roger Munday
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