Glossary

Lucifer

Lucifer began as a plain Latin word for a bright celestial body, long before it took on the meaning of a fallen angel.

A Latin compound

The word joins the Latin lux, "light," with the suffix -fer, "bringing," to form a term meaning "light-bringing" — used in Latin to mean "morning star," the light that appears on the horizon before dawn. It was also simply the Latin name for the planet Venus in its role as the morning star, or daystar.