Ptolemy

American  

[tol-uh-mee] / ˈtɒl ə mi /

noun

Ptolemies plural

1. Claudius Ptolemaeus, flourished a.d. 127–151, Hellenistic mathematician, astronomer, and geographer in Alexandria.

2. any of the kings of the Macedonian dynasty that ruled Egypt 323–30 b.c.

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Ptolemy British  

/ ˈtɒlɪmɪ /

noun

1. Latin name Claudius Ptolemaeus. 2nd century _ad , Greek astronomer, mathematician, and geographer. His Geography was the standard geographical textbook until the discoveries of the 15th century. His system of astronomy (see Ptolemaic system ), as expounded in the Almagest, remained undisputed until the Copernican system was evolved

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Ptolemy Scientific  

/ tŏl′ə-mē /

1. Greek astronomer and mathematician who based his astronomy on the belief that all heavenly bodies revolved around Earth. Ptolemy's model of the solar system endured until the 16th century when Nicolaus Copernicus proposed that the heavenly bodies in the solar system orbited the Sun.

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Ptolemy ¹ Cultural  

1. An ancient Greek astronomer, living in Egypt (see also Egypt), who proposed a way of calculating the movements of the planets on the assumption that they, along with the sun and the stars, revolved around the Earth. (See Ptolemaic universe.)

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Ptolemy ² Cultural  

1. An ancient Greek astronomer, living in Egypt (see also Egypt), who proposed a way of calculating the movements of the planets on the assumption that they, along with the sun and the stars, were embedded in clear spheres that revolved around the Earth. The system of Ptolemy, called the Ptolemaic universe, prevailed in astronomy for nearly fifteen hundred years, until the modern model of the solar system, with the sun at the center and the planets in motion, was developed from the ideas of Copernicus.

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Other Word Forms

Noun Inflected Forms

• Ptolemies
  plural

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

Ptolemy Ptolemies

Memorable figures include the town barber and perpetual bachelor, Jayber Crow, and the Falstaffian 300-pound farmer Ptolemy Proudfoot, who lives happily with his diminutive wife, Miss Minnie.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 23, 2025

Clausen believes the chart’s author conflated Ptolemy with a dynasty of Greek kings who had ruled Egypt.

From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 25, 2023

A few centuries later, another Greek astronomer, Ptolemy, attempted to classify stars using a six-tier scale, assigning the brightest stars to the first tier and the faintest ones to the sixth.

From Scientific American ● Jul. 28, 2023

Egyptologists have confirmed that she was Macedonian-Greek on the side of her father, Ptolemy XII, but her maternal heritage is less clear; little is known about her birth mother’s ethnic origin.

From Los Angeles Times ● May 10, 2023

Ptolemy XII could be weak, harsh, and unpredictable.

From "Sterling Biographies®: Cleopatra: Egypt's Last and Greatest Queen" by Susan Blackaby

They also warred with one another, however, with the Ptolemies and the Seleucids emerging as particularly bitter rivals, frequently fighting over the territories that divided their empires.

From Textbooks ● Jan. 1, 2020

Once they cemented their control, the Ptolemies were able to simply act as pharaohs, despite remaining ethnically and linguistically Macedonian Greek.

From Textbooks ● Jan. 1, 2020

It was from the Ptolemies that the tube-blown glassmaking techniques we see today derive.

From Slate ● Jul. 29, 2019

Egyptians began to convert to Christianity not long after the time of Christ, but most people never learned the languages of their successive foreign rulers: the Ptolemies, the Romans, the Byzantines.

From The New Yorker ● Apr. 10, 2017

In this and other ways the Ptolemies were able, in just a few decades, to amass the largest collection of books in the Greek world.

From "Circumference" by Nicholas Nicastro