Late Middle English (originally referring to the Milky Way): via Old French from medieval Latin galaxia, from Greek galaxias (kuklos) 'milky (vault)', from gala, galakt- 'milk'.

• If you look into the sky on a dark moonless night you can see a band of pale light crossing the sky, made up of vast numbers of faint stars that appear to be packed closely together. This is the Milky Way, a direct translation of what the Romans called via lactea. The Greeks were also reminded of milk and named it galaxias kuklos ‘the milky vault’, from gala ‘milk’, the origin of our word galaxy. It was adopted into medieval English and at first referred specifically to the Milky Way, though later it applied to any system of millions of stars. In current sporting usage, especially in football, galactico is a term for one of a team's superstar players. A Spanish word, it is chiefly associated with the club Real Madrid, whose high-profile signings Luis Figo, Zinedine Zidane, Ronaldo Lima, and David Beckham were collectively dubbed Los Galácticos, literally ‘the galactics’, because they were ‘bigger than stars’.