Word History: Appropriately, lava was named by people living near Mount Vesuvius. The only active volcano on the European mainland, Vesuvius has erupted frequently since Pompeii and Herculaneum were buried by it in AD 79. The Neapolitans who lived in the vicinity took the Italian word lava, meaning "a stream caused suddenly by rain," and applied it to the streams of molten rock coming down the sides of Vesuvius. The term was then taken into Standard Italian, where it came to mean the rock in both its molten and its solidified states. The Italian word was borrowed into English around the middle of the 18th century.