Earth & SkyGreek → English
Polar
/ˈpoʊlər/adjective
Belonging to the far north or far south of the earth, or to either end of a magnet or a charged molecule.
The Greek roots
πόλος
pólos
axis, pivot
Literally: “of the pivot”
Follow a root:πόλος2 words
The story of the word
Before it meant the ends of the earth, πόλος was the pivot of an axle, the point a thing turns on. Aristotle used it for the fixed points the heavens revolve around. The magnetic sense came from the compass needle swinging north, and the chemical sense, a molecule with opposite charges at its two ends, borrowed the image from the magnet in the nineteenth century.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Medieval Latin → English
- First recorded
- 1550s
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
polepolarizedipole
In a sentence
Polar bears hunt seals from the edge of the sea ice.
Water is a polar molecule, which is why it dissolves salt so readily.