Swastika ring 卐 right-facing

The word swastika is derived from the Sanskrit swasti, which is composed of Su (सु – good, well, auspicious) and Asti (अस्ति – "it is" or "there is")

The word swastika has been used in the Indian subcontinent since 500 BCE. The word was first recorded by the ancient linguist Pāṇini in his work Ashtadhyayi. An important early use of the word swastika in a European text was in 1871 with the publications of Heinrich Schliemann, who discovered more than 1,800 ancient samples of the swastika symbol and its variants while digging the Hisarlik mound near the Aegean Sea coast for the history of Troy. Schliemann linked his findings to the Sanskrit swastika.

The word swasti occurs frequently in the Vedas as well as in classical literature, meaning "health, luck, success, prosperity", and it was commonly used as a greeting. The final ka is a common suffix that could have multiple meanings. According to Monier-Williams, a majority of scholars consider it a solar symbol. The sign implies something fortunate, lucky, or auspicious, and it denotes auspiciousness or well-being.

The earliest known use of the word swastika is in Panini's Ashtadhyayi, which uses it to explain one of the Sanskrit grammar rules, in the context of a type of identifying mark on a cow's ear. Most scholarship suggests that Panini lived in or before the 4th century BCE, possibly in 6th or 5th century BCE.

By the 19th century, the term swastika was adopted into the English lexicon, replacing gammadion from Greek γαμμάδιον.

The concept of a "reversed" swastika was probably first made among European scholars by Eugène Burnouf in 1852, and taken up by Schliemann in Ilios (1880), based on a letter from Max Müller that quotes Burnouf. The term sauwastika is used in the sense of "backwards swastika" by Eugène Goblet d'Alviella (1894): "In India it [the gammadion] bears the name of swastika, when its arms are bent towards the right, and sauwastika when they are turned in the other direction.