Cosmos

How to spell cosmos

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce cosmos

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cosmos mean?

1. nounThe universe regarded as an ordered, harmonious whole.
2. nounA garden plant of the daisy family with showy, daisy-like flowers.

Cosmos in a sentence

• The documentary explored how stars and galaxies formed across the cosmos.

• She planted cosmos along the back fence for late-summer colour.

• Ancient astronomers believed the cosmos followed predictable mathematical patterns.

• The cosmos attracted bees throughout the warm months.

Where does cosmos come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word comes directly from the ancient Greek kosmos, which originally meant 'order' or 'good arrangement', and by extension 'ornament' or 'decoration', a sense that survives in the related word 'cosmetic'. The Greek philosopher Pythagoras is traditionally credited with applying kosmos to the whole universe, because he saw the heavens as a model of perfect, harmonious order rather than chaos. English picked the term up in the 1600s, and it was given a major boost in the 1800s by the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, whose multi-volume work titled Kosmos described the universe as an ordered whole. The garden flower called cosmos was named by Spanish priests in Mexico, who admired the neat, balanced arrangement of its petals and applied the same Greek idea of orderly beauty. The trap in spelling is the middle and final s sounds, since the unstressed ending can be heard as either a soft or sharp s.

How the word is built

• cosmos (from Greek kosmos: order, ornament, world)