The Gāyatrī, word by word — and who it is actually addressed to
The popular claimGāyatrī is not the name of the goddess. It is the name of the metre.
More people recite this verse than any other in Sanskrit, and a surprising number could not say what its main verb is.
That is not a failing of devotion. It is what happens when a verse is learned as a sound before it is learned as a sentence — which is how most of us learned it.
Where it comes from
The verse is Ṛgveda 3.62.10, in the maṇḍala attributed to Viśvāmitra. It is not a standalone prayer composed for recitation; it is one verse inside a hymn, and the hymn around it is addressed to Savitṛ.
The name is the metre
Gāyatrī is a chandas — a metre. It is defined by its shape: three lines of eight syllables each, twenty-four in all. Any verse in that shape is a gāyatrī verse, and the Ṛgveda contains thousands of them.
This particular one came to be called the Gāyatrī because of how heavily it was used, and the metre's name attached itself to the verse. Later tradition personifies Gāyatrī as a goddess, and that devotional development is real and old — but it runs in that direction. The metre did not get its name from a deity; the deity took her name from the metre.
The deity the verse itself addresses is Savitṛ — from the root sū, to impel, to set in motion. Savitṛ is the Sun considered as the one who rouses and sets things going, which is precisely what the verse asks him to do.
The words
तत् — tat — that. Pointing forward, to the glory named next.
सवितुः — savituḥ — of Savitṛ. Genitive: the glory belongs to him.
वरेण्यम् — vareṇyam — to be chosen, desirable, excellent. From vṛ, to choose. Not "bright" — choiceworthy.
भर्गः — bhargaḥ — radiance, splendour. The object of the verb that follows.
देवस्य — devasya — of the god. Agreeing with savituḥ.
धीमहि — dhīmahi — may we hold it in thought, may we meditate upon it. This is the main verb of the first sentence, and it is the word most often lost in translation. The verse does not say "we praise" or "we worship". It says we place this in our thought.
धियः — dhiyaḥ — thoughts, insights, the faculty of understanding. The same root as dhīmahi.
यः — yaḥ — who. Relative pronoun, taking us into the second clause.
नः — naḥ — our.
प्रचोदयात् — pracodayāt — may he impel, may he set in motion. Causative, optative. Same idea as the name Savitṛ itself.
What the sentence says
Put together: may we hold in our thought that choiceworthy radiance of the god Savitṛ — he who may impel our thoughts.
Notice the shape of it. The verse asks for one thing, and that thing is not wealth, protection, or the removal of an obstacle. It asks that the faculty of understanding be set in motion. The two halves mirror each other: we hold in thought, he impels thought.
The syllables, and why twenty-four
Three padas of eight. Counted strictly, the first line as usually written has seven syllables, and the tradition itself noticed — the standard remedy is to read vareṇyam as vareṇiyam, restoring the eighth.
That is not a flaw being papered over. It is a preserved trace of how the language sounded when the verse was composed, kept because the metre mattered enough that nobody was willing to quietly fix the text.
What is not on this page
A count of how many repetitions produce a result. The verse asks for thought to be impelled; it does not attach a quantity to that, and neither will we.
Where a household or lineage recites a form that differs slightly, this page is not correcting it. What is given here is the Ṛgvedic verse, its metre, and its grammar.
Source — Rigveda 3.62.10, in the Vishvamitra mandala; the standard metrical description of gayatri chandas as three padas of eight syllables
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