Nova

How to spell nova

4 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce nova

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does nova mean?

1. nounA star that suddenly brightens dramatically and then slowly fades back to its original state.

Nova in a sentence

• The astronomy class watched footage of a distant nova flaring in the night sky.

• The observatory recorded a nova that grew thousands of times brighter within days.

Where does nova come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes straight from Latin, where nova is the feminine form of the adjective novus, meaning 'new'. Astronomers adopted it as a shortening of the Latin phrase stella nova, literally 'new star', because such an object seems to appear suddenly in a part of the sky where no star had been visible before. The Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe famously used the term in the 1570s after observing a brilliant new point of light, and the single word nova settled into scientific English by the nineteenth century. The very same novus root sits inside everyday words such as 'novel', 'novice', and 'innovate', all of which carry the sense of newness. Because the spelling is short and tracks its sound closely, the only thing to remember is the plain Latin ending -a rather than an English -er.

How the word is built

• nov- (from Latin novus: new)
• -a (Latin feminine ending)