Extraterrestrial

How to spell extraterrestrial

16 letters · 6 syllables

How to pronounce extraterrestrial

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does extraterrestrial mean?

1. adjectiveOriginating, existing, or occurring beyond the Earth and its atmosphere.
2. nounA hypothetical or fictional being that comes from somewhere other than Earth.

Extraterrestrial in a sentence

• adjective

  The lab tests rocks for signs of extraterrestrial life.

• noun

  The film portrays a friendly extraterrestrial stranded far from home.

• adjective

  The documentary examined claims of extraterrestrial visits during the last century.

• noun

  The novel imagines first contact with an intelligent extraterrestrial.

Where does extraterrestrial come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word is built from two Latin elements: extra, meaning 'outside' or 'beyond', and terrestris, meaning 'earthly' or 'of the land', which itself grows from terra, the Latin word for 'earth' or 'ground'. English already had 'terrestrial' (relating to the Earth) by the late 1300s, borrowed through scholarly Latin, and 'extraterrestrial' was assembled on top of it in the nineteenth century as astronomers and writers needed a tidy word for anything lying beyond our planet. The same terra root still surfaces in everyday words like 'terrain', 'territory', and 'terrace', all of which keep the doubled effect of an unstressed vowel before a tricky cluster. Originally a purely scientific adjective for objects and forces outside Earth, it picked up its familiar noun sense (a being from another world) through twentieth-century science fiction. The spelling trap lives in the seam between the two halves: 'extra' followed by 'terr' produces a run of letters where the second 'r' and the unstressed vowels are easy to drop or double wrongly.

How the word is built

• extra- (beyond, outside)
• terrestr- (from Latin terra: earth, land)
• -ial (adjective suffix)