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Astronomy

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  • $\begingroup$ Interestingly, Neptune seems to be more popular than Uranus, over most of the last centuries, see Google Ngram. I am aware that the words are not necessarily refering to planets, in particular as the discovery of Neptune was in September 1846. (Uranus was discovered in March 1781.) $\endgroup$
    – B--rian
    Commented Mar 16, 2021 at 12:39
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    $\begingroup$ I'm 100% sure that a) it's because of the way Uranus sounds when said out loud, and b) the decision was made in the collective unconscious, we'll never find a smoking gun, or a... $\endgroup$
    – uhoh
    Commented Mar 16, 2021 at 12:48
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    $\begingroup$ @uhoh I totally agree with your explanation, that's why I was playing with Ngrams. My result is far from reproducible since Ngrams also depends heavily on the corpus used. Beside of the obvious puns on Uranus, Neptune is also the more-known Greek god than Uranus, I feel (without having a statistics on that). $\endgroup$
    – B--rian
    Commented Mar 16, 2021 at 12:53
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    $\begingroup$ @uhoh I suspect Urontosomething. $\endgroup$
    – David Hammen
    Commented Mar 16, 2021 at 17:30
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    $\begingroup$ @DavidHammen groan... :-) $\endgroup$
    – uhoh
    Commented Mar 17, 2021 at 10:36