Meaning

noun the 12th letter of the Greek alphabet

originCoined by Charles Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg in 1864 (through mistranslating a word in the Mayan Madrid Codex using the De Landa alphabet), as the name of a land that had been submerged by a catastrophe; later identified as Atlantis by Augustus Le Plongeon.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 3.0