Earth & SkyGreek → English
Almagest
/ˈælməˌdʒɛst/proper noun
Ptolemy's second-century treatise on astronomy, the standard authority in Europe and the Islamic world for well over a thousand years.
The Greek roots
μεγίστη
megístē
greatest
Literally: “the greatest”
Follow a root:μεγίστη1 word
The story of the word
Ptolemy called his book the Mathematical Compilation. Later Greek readers called it the great one, and then simply ἡ μεγίστη, the greatest. Arabic translators kept that superlative and fused their own article to it, al-majisṭī, and medieval Latin took it back as Almagest. The title therefore reached Europe wearing an Arabic definite article on a Greek adjective, and Chaucer's Wife of Bath is already citing it by 1390.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Arabic → Medieval Latin → English
- First recorded
- 14th century
Same family
megaphonemegalithomegamegalomania
In a sentence
Every European star catalogue before Tycho leans on the Almagest.