| The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. |
A Practical and Authoritative Guide to Contemporary English. 1996.
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4. Science Terms: Distinctions, Restrictions, and Confusions
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| § 35. meteor / meteorite / meteoroid |
| Originally, the word meteor was used to indicate any type of atmospheric phenomena. People spoke of rain, hail, and snow as aqueous meteors; of wind as airy meteors; of the aurora borealis as luminous meteors; and of shooting stars as fiery meteors. Nowadays, this sense of meteor lingers on in meteorology, which is the study of the atmosphere and weather conditions. The word meteor itself, however, has narrowed in meaning to indicate fiery meteors only. As the name suggests, meteors were considered to be of atmospheric origin. Prior to the 19th century, the possibility that they came from interplanetary space was considered unbelievable among the general public. Thomas Jefferson claimed in 1809 that people would rather “believe that Yankee professors would lie, than that stones would fall from heaven.” Popular explanations for meteors and the stones found where they fell ranged from clouds sweeping up dirt and raining down rocks, to bolts of lightening simply striking stones already in the earth. The term for a stone associated with the meteor phenomena is meteorite. Note the -ite suffix, which is commonly used to indicate a rock or mineral. Thus, meteorites are the terrestrial stones that appear to be associated with the fiery meteor phenomena, and meteor is used to indicate the streak of light produced in the atmosphere. The term meteorite is the second oldest term of the three, and the first citations for it in The Oxford English Dictionary place it in the 1820s. It was at this time that scientific opinion about the source of meteorites was beginning to change. An American scientist instrumental in this change was Huburt Anson Newton, a Yale astronomy professor. He predicted an 1866 meteor shower by associating the meteor phenomena with a comet that was due to be observed that year. Newton is attributed with the first citation for meteoroid in The Oxford English Dictionary: “The term meteoroid will be used to designate such a body before it enters the earth’s atmosphere.” Thus, the terminology for Earth-bound stones from interplanetary space is partitioned according to the stones’ stages of descent: a meteoroid is a stone in interplanetary space ranging in size from a speck of dust to a chunk about 100 meters in diameter—just shy of being an asteroid; a meteor is the bright flash of light produced by a meteoroid as it hits Earth’s atmosphere and is also used to refer to the stone itself while it is in Earth’s atmosphere; finally, a meteorite is a meteoroid that has survived the transition through Earth’s atmosphere and rests on Earth’s surface. | 1 |
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| The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. Copyright © 1996 by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. |
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