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Inertia is the resistance of any physical object to any change in its velocity. This includes changes to the object's speed, or direction of motion. An aspect of this property is the tendency of objects to keep moving in a straight line at a constant speed, when no forces act upon them.

Inertia comes from the Latin word, iners, meaning idle, sluggish. Inertia is one of the primary manifestations of mass, which is a quantitative property of physical systems. Isaac Newton defined inertia as a force, before his first law in the monumental Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. There, one reads:

DEFINITION III. The vis insita, or innate force of matter, is a power of resisting by which every body, as much as in it lies, endeavours to persevere in its present state, whether it be of rest or of moving uniformly forward in a right line.

After some other definitions, Newton states (at page 83) his first law of motion:

LAW I. Every body perseveres in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed thereon.

Note that Newton makes use of the active verbal form "to persevere", rather than other passive forms such as "to continue", or "to remain", commonly found in modern textbooks. This follows from some changes in Newton's original mechanics (as stated in the Principia) made by Euler, d'Alembert, and other Cartesians.

In common usage, the term "inertia" may refer to an object's "amount of resistance to change in velocity" or for simpler terms, "resistance to a change in motion" (which is quantified by its mass), or sometimes to its momentum, depending on the context. The term "inertia" is more properly understood as shorthand for "the principle of inertia" as described by Newton in his first law of motion, stated above, according to which an object will continue moving at its current velocity until some force causes its speed or direction to change.

On the surface of the Earth, inertia is often masked by gravity and the effects of friction and air resistance, both of which tend to decrease the speed of moving objects (commonly to the point of rest). This misled the philosopher Aristotle to believe that objects would move only as long as force was applied to them.

The principle of inertia is one of the fundamental principles in classical physics that are still used today to describe the motion of objects and how they are affected by the applied forces on them.