Earth & SkyGreek → English
Bolide
/ˈboʊlaɪd/noun
An exceptionally bright meteor, often one that explodes audibly in the atmosphere.
The Greek roots
βολίς
bolís
missile, thrown thing
Literally: “a thrown missile”
Follow a root:βολίς1 word
The story of the word
βολίς came from βάλλω, to throw, and named a javelin or a sounding lead dropped from a ship. French astronomers took it in the eighteenth century for fireballs, and English borrowed it from them. Geologists now use it in a looser way, for any large impactor whose composition is unknown, as in the bolide that ended the Cretaceous.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → French → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
Same family
parableproblemsymbolballistic
In a sentence
The Chelyabinsk bolide blew out windows across the city before anyone heard it.