Nebula

How to spell nebula

6 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce nebula

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does nebula mean?

1. nounA vast cloud of gas and dust in space, often visible as a hazy patch of light.

Nebula in a sentence

• The telescope captured a glowing nebula thousands of light years away.

• Astronomers believe a new star is forming inside the nebula.

Where does nebula come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word is the Latin nebula taken almost unchanged into English, where it originally meant 'mist', 'cloud', or 'vapour'. The Latin term traces back to an ancient root for cloudiness that also produced the Greek nephele, 'cloud', and it is a cousin of words like the German Nebel, 'fog'. English first borrowed it in the 1600s in a medical sense, describing a cloudy or filmy spot on the eye or in urine. Astronomers later adopted it for the faint, cloud-like patches of light they saw among the stars, and by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries this became its dominant meaning. The misty origin is a useful memory hook for the spelling: the soft, unstressed -ula ending really does drift like the vapour the word once named, which is exactly where writers slip.

How the word is built

• nebul- (from Latin nebula: mist, cloud, vapour)
• -a (Latin feminine noun ending)