Every disaster is, literally, a 'bad star'.

The word arrived in English around the 1590s, borrowed from Middle French désastre, itself from Italian disastro. Break it apart and the cosmology is right there: dis-, a Latin prefix meaning 'bad' or 'ill', fused with astro, from the Greek astron — star. A disaster was, quite literally, a catastrophe caused by a star being in the wrong place.

This was not poetry. It was diagnosis. In the Renaissance world, astrology was a serious explanatory framework — physicians, generals, and princes genuinely consulted the heavens before making decisions. When crops failed or a battle was lost, blaming an ill-aspected planet was the era's equivalent of citing a root cause.

The Italian root disastro almost certainly carried this astrological weight from the start, though the specific first use is hard to pin down. What is clear is that by the time English writers adopted the word, it was already broadening — shedding the literal stars and absorbing any sudden, overwhelming calamity.

Today nobody checks Jupiter's position before calling a flood a disaster. But every time the word is used — in a headline, an insurance claim, a text message — it carries a ghost of the Renaissance sky inside it.