Most of these languages either inherited (in case of the Romance languages like Italian, French, or Spanish) or borrowed this word directly or indirectly from Latin leō, except for Greek, which is where in turn Latin got that word from (or rather its ancient form léōn). Since this seems to be a very old loanword, centuries of language change have yielded rather distinct outcomes in the modern languages, but the /l/ phoneme as well as some kind of /e/ sound have been preserved quite well.