As the title suggests, can the word sputnik be used as a replacement for moon or satellite in modern English?
The reason why I am asking this is because I remember reading (probably in a history book) that the word sputnik was used for some time in English, after the launch of eponymous space probe.
The word sputnik does have an entry in the OED, in which both the capitalised and non-capitalised forms are mentioned. However from the examples given of the non-capitalised sputnik, I think it will be clear that it was not a general word for satellite but had a slightly ironic sense. In one 1959 example from the Daily Telegraph the author has seen fit to put the word in quotation marks, which I think may be indicative of an attitude to its use in English at the time.
I do not believe anything I have said here detracts from @Mick's answer in any way, and for which I have voted, since there is no evidence in the OED that it was in general use meaning an "artificial satellite".
a. An unmanned artificial earth satellite, esp. a Russian one; spec. (usu. with capital initial) the proper name of a series of such satellites launched by the Soviet Union between 1957 and 1961. The first Sputnik, launched on 4 October 1957, was the first artificial satellite.
1957 Times 9 Oct. 10/6 Pride in the launching of the sputnik (‘fellow-traveller’), as the satellite is called, as well as the guided missile, were reflected in a speech by Mr. Krushchev..last night.
1957 Times 30 Oct. 10/2 Mr. Khrushchev replied: ‘To peace and to the sputnik as a symbol of peace!’
1957 Times 4 Nov. 11/2 The régime which sends a second Sputnik girdling the earth has just emerged from another of its secretly contrived shifts of political power.
1958 A. Huxley Let. 15 Feb. (1969) 846 The technical advances in these psychological, physiological and bio-chemical fields are probably far more important..than the physical and engineering advances which have put sputniks into the heavens.
1964 M. McLuhan Understanding Media iii. 44 When Sputnik had first gone into orbit a schoolteacher asked her second-graders to write some verse on the subject.
1971 New Scientist 10 June 638/1 China's remarkable progress in the field is underscored by the weight of its first sputnik (unmatched..by any satellite launched by France or Japan).
1983 N.Y. Times 7 Jan. a1/4 It is not a dangerous situation..and we have no worries about the fate of this sputnik.
b. transf. and fig.
1958 Newsweek 10 Feb. 25/1 We may find ourselves confronted with a sputnik in the chemical, biological, and radiological field, as we did in missiles.
1959 Daily Tel. 10 Dec. 16/7 Internal ‘sputniks’, pills containing miniature radio transmitters, which can travel around the intestines.
1963 Punch 17 Apr. 549/1 Such Hollywood sputniks as Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jnr.
1968 Michelin Guide N.Y. City 124 Coney Island..scenic railways, loop-the-loops and Ferris wheels compete with phantom trains, tunnels of love, sputniks.
The word Sputnik has no connotations in English as anything other than the original Soviet artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, and its successors.
Wikipedia: List of spacecraft called Sputnik:
Sputnik (Спутник), a Russian word meaning "satellite" or literally "fellow traveler", is a name applied to certain spacecraft launched under the Soviet space program. "Sputnik 1", "Sputnik 2" and "Sputnik 3" were the official Soviet names of those objects, while the remaining designations in the series ("Sputnik 4" and so on) were not official names, but were names applied in the West, to objects whose original Soviet names may not have been known at the time.
Although justifiably famous and obviously well-known at the time, the term sputnik has never gained any usage in the English-speaking world as a generic word for satellite, whether artificial or natural (e.g. the Moon).
A Google Ngram Viewer search for both Sputnik and sputnik gives the following results:
It is interesting that there is usage for both the capitalised and uncapitalised forms, although both usages dropped off in the early 1960s when the American manned space program started and the Sputnik program came to an end.
In British English of the day (circa 1957-60), the Russian word sputnik became synonymous with the word satellite in the UK's media and lexicon, and was most definitely much more of a buzzword than its English language counterpart. Once the US space program caught up with and overtook its Russian counterpart, sputnik faded into the recesses of the ever changing popular lexicon of the era and was replaced exclusively by satellite. For this reason, I consider the word and its usage in English today to be a shibboleth.
sputnik: "Each of a series of Soviet artificial satellites, the first of which (launched on 4 October 1957) was the first satellite to be placed in orbit". (Oxford Dictionary)
