The word swastika came from the Sanskrit word svastika, meaning any lucky or auspicious object, and in particular a mark made on persons and things to denote auspiciousness, or any piece of luck or well-being.

The word swastika came from the Sanskrit word svastika, meaning any lucky or auspicious object, and in particular a mark made on persons and things to denote auspiciousness, or any piece of luck or well-being.

It is composed of su- meaning "good, well" and asti "to be". Suasti thus means "well-being." The suffix -ka, meaning "soul", suastika might thus be translated literally as "that which is associated with well-being," corresponding to "lucky charm" or "thing that is auspicious."[2] The word in this sense is first used in the Harivamsa. The Ramayana does have the word, but in an unrelated sense of "one who utters words of eulogy".

The most traditional form of the swastika's symbolization in Jainism is that the four arms of the swastika remind us that during the cycles of birth and death we may be born into any one of the four destinies: heavenly beings, human beings, animal beings, (including birds, bugs, and plants) and hellish beings.

The most traditional form of the swastika's symbolization in Hinduism is that the symbol represents the purusharthas: dharma (that which makes a human a human), artha (wealth), kama (desire), and moksha (liberation).

The Mahabharata has the word in the sense of "the crossing of the arms or hands on the breast". Both the Mahabharata and the Ramayana also use the word in the sense of "a dish of a particular form" and "a kind of cake". The word does not occur in Vedic Sanskrit. As noted by Monier-Williams in his Sanskrit-English dictionary, according to Alexander Cunningham, its shape represents a monogram formed by interlacing of the letters of the auspicious words su-astí (svasti) written in Ashokan characters.

The Sanskrit term has been in use in English since 1871, replacing gammadion (from Greek γαμμάδιον). Alternative historical English spellings of the Sanskrit phonological words with different meanings to include suastika, swastica, and svastica.

Other names for the shape are:
crooked cross, hook cross or angled cross (Hebrew: צלב קרס, German: Hakenkreuz).
cross cramponned, cramponnée, or cramponny, in heraldry, as each arm resembles a Crampon or angle-iron (German: Winkelmaßkreuz).
fylfot, chiefly in heraldry and architecture. The term was coined in the 19th century based on a misunderstanding of a Renaissance manuscript.
gammadion, tetragammadion (Greek: τετραγαμμάδιον), or cross gammadion (Latin: crux gammata; French: croix gammée), as each arm resembles the Greek letter Γ (gamma).
tetraskelion (Greek: τετρασκέλιον), literally meaning "four legged", especially when composed of four conjoined legs (compare triskelion (Greek: τρισκέλιον)).

The Tibetan swastika (࿖) is known as g.yung drung
The Buddhist sign has been standardized as a Chinese character "卍" (pinyin: wàn) and as such entered various other East Asian languages such as Japanese where the symbol is called "卍" (rōmaji: manji) or "卍字" (manji). The swastika is included as part of the Chinese script in the form of the character "萬" (pinyin: wàn) and has Unicode encodings U+534D 卍 (left-facing) and U+5350 卐 (right-facing);[4] the latter has a mapping in the original Big5 character set,[5] but the former does not (although it's in Big5+[6]). In Unicode 5.2, four swastika symbols were added to the Tibetan block: U+0FD5 ࿕ (right-facing), U+0FD6 ࿖ (left-facing), U+0FD7 ࿗ (right-facing with dots) and U+0FD8 ࿘ (left-facing with dots).