leonid
/ˈliː.ə.nɪd/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 2.91 in modern English
7
Scrabble Score
6
Letters
3
Syllables
6
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
Any meteor of a meteor shower that appears to radiate from the constellation Leo in November.
name
A male given name, a transliteration of a common East Slavic name (notably that of the first two Ukrainian presidents, Leonid Kravchuk and Leonid Kuchma, as well as Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev).
Example Sentences
- "I wrote my first story about the ghost of a horse leaping from a cascade of flame just after the leonids had been more torrential than men had remembered them for centuries."
- "Night of your birth. Thirty-three. The Leonids they were called. God how the stars did fall. I looked for blackness, holes in the heavens. The Dipper stove."
- "I was surprised by […] the unusually tall windows, […] through which long telescopes were once turned on eclipses of the sun and the moon, on the intersections of the orbits of the stars with the line of the meridian, on the Leonid meteorite showers and the long-tailed comets flying through space."
Etymology
Origin
Word Breakdown
- Root: Леоні́д, Λεωνίδας
Subject
Wiktionary places this term in Astronomy.