London ? Venetia Phair, who was 11 years old when she suggested Pluto as the name of the newly discovered planet, has died at age 90, her family said.

She died at home in Epsom on April 30, the family said; the cause of death was not disclosed. The family said a funeral would be today.

Born Venetia Burney, she suggested the name to her grandfather at breakfast in 1930.

“My grandfather, as usual, opened the paper, The Times, and in it he read that a new planet had been discovered. He wondered what it should be called. We all wondered,” she recalled in a short film, “Naming Pluto,” released earlier this year.

“And then I said, ‘Why not call it Pluto?’ And the whole thing stemmed from that.”

Her grandfather was Falconer Madan, the retired librarian of the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. He relayed the suggestion to his friend Herbert Hall Turner, professor of astronomy at Oxford, who on that day was at a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society, where possible names for the planet were being discussed.

Turner then passed the suggestion to Clyde W. Tombaugh, a Kansas University alumnus who made the discovery in Arizona.

When the name was publicly announced on May 1, 1930, Phair said her grandfather rewarded her with a five-pound note. (The same purchasing power today would be about 230 pounds, or $350.)