Zenith

How to spell zenith

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce zenith

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does zenith mean?

1. nounThe highest or most successful point that something reaches.
2. nounThe point in the sky directly overhead an observer.

Zenith in a sentence

• The company reached its commercial zenith in the late nineties.

• At noon the sun was almost at its zenith, casting very short shadows.

• His career hit its zenith when he was promoted to chief executive.

• The telescope was angled toward the zenith to study the stars directly above.

Where does zenith come from?

Language of origin: Arabic

Zenith reaches English from Arabic, and its odd spelling is the result of a medieval scribal accident. The original phrase was samt ar-ras, meaning 'the path over the head', describing the point in the sky directly above an observer; the key word samt simply meant 'path' or 'direction'. When this passed into Medieval Latin and Old Spanish, copyists misread the Arabic letters, turning the 'm' into 'ni', so samt became something like senit or cenith. English borrowed it through Old French in the late 1300s, originally as a precise term of astronomy for the highest point of the celestial sphere. Only later did it broaden into the familiar figurative sense of a peak or culminating moment, as in the zenith of a career. Its sister word from the same Arabic samt is 'azimuth', another navigation term, and that shared origin explains why both look so unlike ordinary English words.

How the word is built

• zenith (single root from Arabic samt, 'path' or 'direction', specifically the path directly overhead)