gibbous
/ˈɡɪbəs/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 1.87 in modern English
12
Scrabble Score
7
Letters
2
Syllables
6
Unique Chars
Meaning
adj
Having more than half (but not the whole) of its disc illuminated.
adj
Example Sentences
- "In fact, what these gibbous human shapes specially represented was ready money—money insistently ready [...]"
- "The moving moon, full, gibbous, or crescent-shaped, shone at last for the navigators of the eighteenth century like a luminous hand on the clock of heaven."
- "On December 7, 1972, the Apollo 17 astronauts took a photograph of a gibbous Earth at a distance of eighteen thousand miles from its surface."
- "A glint of the gibbous moon reflected off the water, but it was hard to see the building clearly in the dark forest."
- "A pointed flinty rock, all bare and black, Grew gibbous from behind the mountain's back;"
Etymology
From Middle English gibbous, from Latin gibbus (“humped, hunched”), probably cognate with cubō (“bend oneself, lie down”), Italian gobba (“humpback”), Ancient Greek κῡφός (kūphós, “humpback, bent”), κύβος (kúbos, “cube, vertebra”), Spanish giboso (“humped”). Also ultimately compare dialectal Norwegian keiv (“slanted, wrong”), German schief (“crooked, slanting”) and Dutch scheef (“crooked, slanting”).
Origin
Word Breakdown
- Root: gibbous, gibbus
Inflected Forms
more gibbous (comparative)
most gibbous (superlative)