We Asked a NASA Expert. How Do Planets Get Their Names?

How do planets get their names?
If you step back in time, thousands of years ago, people knew about the brightest planets pretty much everywhere. These are Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. And pretty much every culture knew about these five planets, which they could easily see up in the sky. They had different names for them — names that we use now in English. These come from the Roman names. And that's because the early astronomers in Europe wrote in Latin, and Latin was the language of the Roman Empire.
So we ended up with these Roman names after the Roman gods — Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. If we keep on going outward, we have three more things that historically have been called planets. You have Uranus, Neptune and Pluto.
These are Greek or Roman names. These planets weren't seen by the Greeks or Romans, but because the discoverers wanted their planets to fit in with the existing theme of the mythology of the existing planets.