# Ishtar

> English word · Proper noun · frequency rank #51,186

## Definitions
1. A goddess of fertility, love, sex, and war. In the Babylonian pantheon, she was the divine personification of the planet Venus; the Assyrian and Babylonian counterpart to the Sumerian Inanna and to the northwest-Semitic goddess Astarte.

## Etymology
Learned borrowing from Akkadian 𒀭𒈹 (Ištar). Doublet of Astarte and Ashtoreth. Despite modern folk-etymology, not related in any way to English Easter.

## Source
Compiled from Wiktionary via kaikki.org (CC BY-SA). Data vintage: 2026-05-06.
Canonical page: https://plainspell.com/en/word/ishtar