‘Meteorology’ and ‘meteors’ across centuries: a short history of two problematic terms

Abstract

The article is dedicated to meaning variations and transformations in the terms meteorology and meteor from antiquity to the present. It is argued that the use of the word meteor as a noun denoting a specific meteorological phenomenon only became established in the Renaissance, as the Greek adjective μετέωρος ‘raised, aloft’ in the substantivized neuter form was originally used in the plural to denote objects in the high in a very general way and in the singular to denote an area, not an object. In the Middle Ages, in contrast, it was the Latin terms impressio or passio that were generally employed to denote meteorological phenomena. An emphasis is also placed on how the term meteorology was problematic in a way from the very beginning, rather than only today, when the term meteor has become more astronomical than meteorological in its first meaning, and efforts have been made to replace the name of the science with completely different terms.