Earth & SkyGreek → English
Colure
/kəˈljʊər/noun
Either of the two great circles of the celestial sphere passing through the poles and the equinoxes or solstices.
The Greek roots
κόλος
kólos
docked, cut short
οὐρά
ourá
tail
Literally: “dock-tailed”
The story of the word
The name means dock-tailed, like a sheep with a cropped tail. For observers in Greece part of each circle never climbs above the horizon, so the tail of it is permanently cut off from view. Chaucer used the word in English in the 1390s, and outside old astronomical writing it has all but vanished.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 14th century
Same family
squirrelanuranurodele
In a sentence
The globe was engraved with both colures and the ecliptic.