Barsoom

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The name Edgar Rice Burroughs gave to the planet Mars in his science fiction novels, a dying world of ancient cities and warring peoples
2. A fictional name for the red planet Mars as it appears in the adventure stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs
3. The imagined Martian world of swordsmen, green warriors and sprawling canals created by the writer Edgar Rice Burroughs

Etymology: Barsoom is the name Edgar Rice Burroughs gave to Mars in his Barsoom novels, beginning with "A Princess of Mars" in 1912. It was a deliberate invention rather than a word inherited from any language. Burroughs built it from the Martian name the locals were supposed to use for their own planet, and the sound was meant to feel alien to English readers, with no clear root in any earthly tongue. The name then escaped the pages. Fans and later writers adopted it as a shorthand for the whole fictional world of Burroughs's Mars, with its sword-wielding warriors, red deserts, and canals, so the word came to mean that imagined planet rather than the real one. Because it was coined in a single author's imagination in the early twentieth century, it has no etymology older than that.

Synonyms: Mars