What literally, from the Greek language, means the word geodesy?

The term "geodesic" comes from geodesy, the science of measuring the size and shape of the Earth; in the original sense, a geodesic was the shortest route between two points on the Earth's surface, namely, a segment of a great circle. The term has been generalized to include measurements in much more general mathematical spaces; for example, in graph theory, one might consider a geodesic between two vertices/nodes of a graph.