Meteorite

How to spell meteorite

9 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce meteorite

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does meteorite mean?

1. nounA piece of rock or metal from space that survives its fall through the atmosphere and lands on a planet's surface.

Meteorite in a sentence

• The museum displays a meteorite recovered from the Arizona desert.

• Scientists tested the iron meteorite for traces of ancient minerals.

Where does meteorite come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word is built on 'meteor', which comes from the Greek meteoron, meaning 'a thing high up' or 'a phenomenon in the sky', from meta 'beyond' combined with aeirein 'to raise or lift up'. For centuries a 'meteor' loosely meant any striking event in the upper air, including rainbows and lightning, before it settled on the streak of light made by debris burning through the atmosphere. As science matured in the early nineteenth century, observers needed a precise term for a fragment that actually survives the fall and lands on the ground, so they added the suffix -ite, the same ending used for naming rocks and minerals such as 'graphite' and 'malachite'. The result, 'meteorite', entered English around the 1820s. The handy distinction to remember is that the burning streak is the meteor and the recovered stone is the meteorite, the rock you can hold, which is why the rock-naming -ite ending closes the word.

How the word is built

• meteor- (from Greek meteoron: thing high in the air)
• -ite (suffix naming rocks, minerals and fossils)