The question just racks my brain because I'm like that. I find it funny in the Hearths Warming Eve play Smart Cookie (Or Applejack add-libbing) calls pre-Equestria Earth. But what about PAST Equestria, as Equestria is a country and, in my head canon, not the entire world. I actually named the planet Equine in one of my fics, but was wondering of what my fellow writers used for the planet's name. Or if it is just Equestria to you...

I use Earth. Either because I'm boring or because it makes sense. And in the case of one (or two, actually) of my fics, because it's supposed to be Earth.

1547409
I've never really given it much thought. I usually just settled for calling it Equestria, but i'll be lurking this thread for better ideas

1547409
I've seen it named Equis, but I personally prefer Gaea to keep in line with the Greek mythology in the show.

I have yet to write a story where I'd need the name of the entire world, so I just use Equestria. Though, this is a curious question indeed...

1547409>>1547424
I've seen Equis several times. I've also seen flatworld several times.

1547409

Earth. It works fine. I've seen Equus in stories about extraterrestrials (Avol in Into the Black, which was a nice change).

1547424
I never considered that...hmm, interesting.
Gaea sounds cool, but it's still basically "Earth" XD

1547409
I like the name Equis, but I've seen Earth, Gaia, and even just plain Equestria. It's really all up to you.

In The Hearth's Warming Eve play, Chancellor Puddinghead (admittedly not the most reliable source) refers to the world as earth, so that's what I use.

1547451
Tru dat
just wanted to know what other people thought of the terrestrial ball our ponies live on.

If it even is a ball

1547409 I personally use Equus, just because I think that humans are the only species that are unoriginal enough to name our planet, essentially "Dirt".

1547409

Realistically, it would be something like Earth as well. Or maybe even "the World", plain and simple. It's the kind of thing that seems very obvious and straightforward from the perspective of most early people - I'm pretty sure no language ever gave this planet some fancy made-up name. Terra, Tellus, Gaia, Jord, etc, they're all just different words for "earth", because that's exactly what it is: The really, really, really big chunk of earth we're all walking around on. There's only one of it, so it doesn't really need any other name.

1547409

I call it Terra. But yeah, canon is weird. I call it that cause it works in context of my stories.

1547409 This infinite plain of existence we call The Universe.

1547409 The Twilight Zone

1547409

Am I the only one that thinks of their world as more of a flat dimension rather than a planet? This helps me to reconcile the fact that Celestia and Luna can control the freaking celestial bodies and influence the night sky; in my opinion, it's just one great big skybox.

1547960
Hmmm.... Interesting take.
I still see it as a planet

1547409
I've also heard all kinds of variations. Some call it Earth, some call it Terra, some call it Gaea, and so on and so forth. The smartest solution I saw was in GhostofHeraclitus' stories that revolve around the Canterlot government. He called it after the celtic goddess of fertility, which was also the roman goddess of horses - Epona!
Apart from your mind being blown by the reference Epona's name in 'Legend of Zelda' has been all this time, I must also admit to it not completely being foolproof. I can't see the gryphons, for example, call their homeworld after a horse goddess. Soo... yeah, you're as far with my comment as you were at the beginning. Now with the added thought that maybe you need to think up a word for Earth for every MLP culture now.

1549200
Which is basically what I was getting at. Gaea and the like work well.

1547409 Either Equestria or "A Very F*cked Up Place"

1547409 I've seen (and used) Equis for the pony name of the planet, but it could be anything, really.
Since there's no canon mention in the show, we could be talking about Earth a long, long time before or after human times; a few fics have done that.

1547960

Pinkie Pie explicitly says "the world is round. There is no up or down" in Hearth's Warming Eve.

I've seen Equus before. Yes, with two U's. It looks awful. IMO Equestria will work in 95% of stories.

In all of my stories, Equestria is a finite-unbounded hyperbolic Pocket Universe. Essentially, it is built like how early judeo-Christian religions insisted that our own universe really was - with a crystal dome for the sky, on which the fiery disk of the sun was glued, and the cool disk of the moon was attached.

In my version, because the pocket cosmos is finite-unbounded (wraps around on all sides in a higher dimension - this is how our own, real universe is described by science) if you dig far enough down (very, very far) you will crack through the crystal dome and fall out of the sky. That's what wrapping in all directions means.

Celestia and Luna can move the sun and moon because they are gargantuan disks of magical construction, and not an unimaginably vast nuclear furnace star and an incredibly huge ball of rock and dust. Their universe is subject to their magical will, and it is much, much smaller in size than our own universe.

All of this allows me to explain why Equestria is so visually similar to our Earth. In the distant past, Celestia used tiny wormholes to peek in on the nearest next-door universe. She wanted to do this because MLP tells us that she and her sister suffered under a thousand years of Discord's chaos - I take this to mean that after they defeated Discord, they were left with a universe of randomness and horror. Order is what they needed, and our universe is very mechanical and orderly in terms of physics.

One problem though - Celestia and Luna could see our world, but not understand how it worked, or what anything meant. So they did the best the could - big bright disk for day, cool dim disk for night. Ponies for people, because that is what they saw when they constructed their reality.

A flat world, like a chessboard, rather than a globe. The ground looks flat, after all.

This makes Equestria a properly magical, unearthly universe apart, yet still makes sense from the perspective of M-Theory and speculative physics.

1553024
I like that explanation since the raising and setting of colossal "spheres" seems pointless if, like an actual planet in our universe, the Equestrian world rotates.