Phosphorescent

adj, noun

adj, noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A phosphorescent substance.
Adjective
  1. 1
    Having the property of emitting light for a period of time after the source of excitation is taken away, e.g., in electrostatic storage tubes and cathode-ray tubes.

    "So he imports this special breed of scorpions and feeds them on metal meal and the scorpions turned a phosphorescent blue color and sort of hummed."

Adjective
  1. 1
    emitting light without appreciable heat as by slow oxidation of phosphorous wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms
lightluminousphotogenicradiant

Example

More examples

"The physicists had shown that the alpha particles falling on a screen of phosphorescent zinc sulphide produced a number of scintillations."

Etymology

From phosphorus + -escent. It's interesting to note that phosphorus is not phosphorescent. Some phosphoric mixtures can be luminescent through chemical reactions, but none exhibit literal phosphorescence.

Related phrases

cathode ray tube

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.