- meteor
[meteor 词源字典] - meteor: [15] Greek metéōron meant literally ‘something high up’, and was used to denote ‘phenomena in the sky or heavens’. It was a compound noun formed from the intensive prefix metá- and *eōr-, a variant form of the base of the verb aeírein ‘raise’. When English first took it over, via medieval Latin meteōrum, it was still in the sense ‘phenomenon of the atmosphere or weather’ (‘hoar frosts … and such like cold meteors’, Abraham Fleming, Panoplie of Epistles 1576), an application which survives, of course, in the derivative meteorology [17].
The earliest evidence of the specific use of meteor for a ‘shooting star’ comes from the end of the 16th century. The derivative meteorite, for a meteor that hits the ground, was coined in the early 19th century.
=> meteorology[meteor etymology, meteor origin, 英语词源]
