Etymology

inertia

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Today it means: The property of a body that resists any change to its uniform motion; equivalent to its mass. Full definition →

Latin inertia
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The story

  1. Latin · borrowed frominertia“lack of art or skill, inactivity, indolence”
  2. English todayinertia

From Latin inertia (“lack of art or skill, inactivity, indolence”), from iners (“unskilled, inactive”), from in- (“without, not”) + ars (“skill, art”). Something close to the modern physics sense was first used in New Latin by Johannes Kepler.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.