Bolide
//ˈboʊ.laɪd// noun
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
Noun
- 1 An extremely bright meteor.
- 2 an especially luminous meteor (sometimes exploding) wordnet
- 3 Any extraterrestrial body that collides with Earth.
"The smallest impactor that can penetrate the atmosphere deep enough to cause any damage on the ground is not much smaller than the "Tunguska" bolide that flattened a couple thousand square miles of Siberian forest in 1908."
- 4 A fireball.
Example
More examples"The smallest impactor that can penetrate the atmosphere deep enough to cause any damage on the ground is not much smaller than the "Tunguska" bolide that flattened a couple thousand square miles of Siberian forest in 1908."
Etymology
Borrowed from French bolide, from Latin bolis, from Ancient Greek βολίς (bolís, “missile, arrow, javelin”). Doublet of bolis.
More for "bolide"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.