Astronaut

How to spell astronaut

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce astronaut

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does astronaut mean?

1. nounA person trained to travel and work in a spacecraft beyond the Earth's atmosphere.

Astronaut in a sentence

• The astronaut spent six months aboard the orbiting station.

• Every astronaut undergoes years of physical and technical training before launch.

Where does astronaut come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word was assembled from two Greek elements: astron, meaning 'star', and nautes, meaning 'sailor', so an astronaut is literally a 'star sailor'. The model for the coinage was the older word 'aeronaut', a term for balloonists that used the same -naut ending alongside aer, meaning 'air'. The Greek nautes itself comes from naus, meaning 'ship', the same root that gives English 'nautical' and 'navy'. 'Astronaut' first appeared in the 1920s in science fiction, but it entered everyday speech in the late 1950s and early 1960s as the United States space programme adopted it for its crewed spaceflight pilots. The spelling keeps both Greek pieces intact, which is why the ending is -naut rather than the more obvious-looking -not.

How the word is built

• astro- (from Greek astron: star)
• naut (from Greek nautes: sailor)