Astronomy

How to spell astronomy

9 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce astronomy

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does astronomy mean?

1. nounThe scientific study of celestial objects such as stars, planets, and galaxies, and of the universe as a whole.

Astronomy in a sentence

• She studied astronomy at university before joining the observatory.

• A clear, dark night is ideal for amateur astronomy.

Where does astronomy come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word comes from the Greek astronomia, which combined astron, meaning 'star', with nomos, meaning 'law' or 'arrangement', so the literal sense was something like 'the ordering of the stars' or 'the laws governing the heavens'. The Greek verb behind nomos was nemein, 'to distribute or manage', so an astronomos was originally a person who arranged or mapped the heavenly bodies. The word travelled into Latin as astronomia and then into English through Old French in the 1200s, at a time when it overlapped heavily with astrology before the two gradually split into the science and the divination. The same astron root sits inside familiar relatives such as 'asterisk' (a little star), 'disaster' (literally an 'ill star'), and 'astronaut' (a 'star sailor'). The spelling trap is the unstressed middle: the stress lands on the second syllable, so the o in 'astro' and the schwa before the -my both go quiet, which is why writers must remember it is astro plus nomy and not 'astrology' or some respelled vowel.

How the word is built

• astro- (from Greek astron: star)
• -nomy (from nomos: law, ordering of knowledge)