name, noun ·Uncommon ·Advanced level
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"And They made by the lifting of Their hands, each god according to his sign, the Bright One with the flaring tail to seek from the end of the Worlds to the end of them again, to return again after a hundred years. Man, when thou seest the comet, know that another seeketh besides thee nor ever findeth out."
"Upon his browes was pourtraid vgly death, And in his eies the furies of his heart, That ſhine as Comets, menacing reueng, And caſts a pale complexion on his cheeks."
"Halley's Comet comes round once every eighty years."
A small Solar System body consisting mainly of volatile ice, dust and particles of rock whose very eccentric solar orbit periodically brings it close enough to the Sun that the ice vaporises to form an atmosphere, or coma, which may be blown by the solar wind to produce a visible tail.
Common synonyms include: aldebaran, canicula, celestial body, cosmic snowball, daystar, dirty snowball.
Halley's Comet comes round once every eighty years.
Pronounced /ˈkɒmɪt/.
From Middle English comete, partly from Old English comēta and partly from Old French comete, both from Latin comētēs, from Ancient Greek κομήτης (komḗtēs, “longhaired”), short for ἀστὴρ κομήτης ([astēr] komētēs, "longhaired [star])" and referring to the tail of a comet, from κόμη (kómē, “hair”). Compare English faxed star and Latin crīnīta stēlla (“comet”, literally “(long) haired star”).
First attested in the 1823 poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas”. From comet.
Coined by software engineer Alex Russell in March 2006. After the Comet brand of cleaning products, as a pun on Ajax, which is also both a Web programming technique and a brand of cleaning products.