meteorite

American  

[mee-tee-uh-rahyt] / ˈmi ti əˌraɪt /

noun

• meteorites
  plural

1. a mass of stone or metal that has reached the earth from outer space; a fallen meteoroid.

2. a meteoroid.

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meteorite British  

/ ˈmiːtɪəˌraɪt /

noun

1. a rocklike object consisting of the remains of a meteoroid that has fallen on earth. It may be stony (chondrite), iron, or stony iron (pallasite) See chondrite

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meteorite Scientific  

/ mē′tē-ə-rīt′ /

1. A meteor that reaches the Earth's surface because it has not been burned up by friction with the atmosphere. Meteorites are believed to be fragments of comets and asteroids.

2. ◆ Meteorites that consist mostly of silicates are called stony meteorites and are classified as either chondrites or achondrites.

3. ◆ Meteorites that consist mostly of iron are called iron meteorites.

4. ◆ Meteorites that consist of a mixture of silicates and iron are called stony-iron meteorites.

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Other Word Forms

Derived Forms

• meteorital
  adjective
• meteoritic
  adjective
• meteoritical
  adjective

Inflected Forms

Nouns

• meteorites
  plural

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Etymology

Origin of meteorite

First recorded in 1815–25; meteor + -ite ¹

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Explanation

A meteorite is a rock that falls to earth after a brilliant meteor has passed through the earth's atmosphere. If you've ever seen a shooting star at night, you can call what you're watching zip brightly across the sky a meteor. If that same meteor makes it through the atmosphere of the earth, its fire burns out and it becomes a meteorite, or a random piece of space debris that may have originally come from an asteroid or comet. The Greek root for both meteor and meteorite is ta meteora, "things in heaven above."

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

meteorite meteorites

There are seagull puppets, a tandem bicycle, an oil stain in the shape of a rabbit, a meteorite.

From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 7, 2026

Remarkably, the meteorite has retained much of its original mineral makeup despite surviving billions of years of solar system history.

From Science Daily ● Sep. 25, 2026

Grizedale Observatory near Ambleside, Cumbria, opened in May 2024, offering public access to telescopes, a planetarium and meteorite laboratory, as well as staging a dark skies festival and other events.

From BBC ● Sep. 25, 2026

Using small pieces of the original meteorite, the team separated tiny mineral grains and identified several CAIs containing naturally magnetic minerals, including iron.

From Science Daily ● Sep. 25, 2026

Hours later, however, we haven’t found one meteorite, not one piece of sky litter, but I so don’t care.

From "I'll Give You the Sun" by Jandy Nelson

He gained international recognition for his lunar research before moving to Cambridge University, where he analysed meteorites found in Antarctica that were believed to have come from Mars.

From BBC ● Oct. 8, 2026

"Other meteorites went through many different processes over this 4.5 billion year history," Weiss says.

From Science Daily ● Sep. 25, 2026

Those bodies subsequently melted, destroying the physical evidence and making the oldest chondrules much harder to find in surviving meteorites.

From Science Daily ● Sep. 23, 2026

From about 4.56 billion to 3.5 billion years ago, meteorites, micrometeorites and interplanetary dust particles from asteroids and comets repeatedly struck Earth.

From Science Daily ● Jul. 19, 2026

Trucks carry off skeletons and meteorites and octopi in jars and herbarium sheets and Egyptian gold and South African ivory and Permian fossils.

From "All the Light We Cannot See" by Anthony Doerr

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