Earth & SkyGreek → English
Tektite
/ˈtɛktaɪt/noun
A small glassy body formed when a meteorite impact melts ground rock and throws it through the air.
The Greek roots
τηκτός
tēktós
molten, melted
Literally: “melted stone”
Follow a root:τηκτός1 word
The story of the word
Franz Eduard Suess named them in 1900, arguing from the shapes that the glass had been liquid in flight. The strewn fields run for thousands of kilometres from their craters, and the Australian ones, australites, are shaped like buttons with flanges because they melted again on re-entry. Nobody located the crater for the largest field, the Australasian one, until very recently, and the identification is still argued.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1900
In a sentence
He kept a black tektite on the windowsill, worn smooth as a beach pebble.