Word of the Day
perennial
adjective
perpetual; everlasting; continuing; recurrent.
More about perennial
Perennial, “perpetual, continuing,” comes from Latin perennis, “lasting the whole year through,” which is based on per, “through, by,” and -enn-, a combining form of annus, “year.” A common trend in Latin is for a to change to e or i in compounds; other examples of this include ars, “skill,” becoming iners, “unskillful” (compare art and inert), and amīcus, “friend,” becoming inimicus, “unfriendly” (compare amicable, enemy, and the Word of the Day inimical). Perennial is often confused with annual because the two have similar meanings and origins, but you can learn to tell the difference by reading our article on these words. Perennial was first recorded in English circa 1640.
EXAMPLE OF PERENNIAL USED IN A SENTENCE
A key feature of the lands north of the Arctic Circle is its nearly perennial winter, with cold temperatures even in July.
Oort cloud
noun
a region of our solar system far beyond the orbit of Pluto, in which billions of comets move in nearly circular orbits unless one is pulled into a highly eccentric elliptical orbit by a passing star.
Why the Museum of Science chose Oort cloud
Earlier this year, astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope to photograph one of the largest comets ever observed. Thought to have originated from the Oort cloud, this comet was twice the size of Rhode Island, measuring 80 miles across with a nucleus 50 times larger than other known comets! Watch the video below to learn more about the Oort cloud from award-winning science communicator Maynard Okereke, better known as the Hip Hop M.D.
More about Oort cloud
The Oort cloud is the namesake of Dutch astronomer Jan Hendrik Oort, who first proposed the cloud’s existence. The surname Oort comes from Middle Dutch ort or oort, meaning “edge, corner, outermost point,” which makes the name Oort cloud serendipitously perfect for an area at the farthest reaches of the Solar System. Oort cloud was coined in the 1970s.
EXAMPLE OF OORT CLOUD USED IN A SENTENCE
Because the Oort cloud is so far away and contains such dim objects, we may never know just how many comets are secretly lurking out there.
FUN FACT ABOUT OORT CLOUD
While the Kuiper belt is 30–50 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun and contains dwarf planets, the Oort cloud is a whopping 2,000–200,000 AU from the Sun and contains only asteroid-like objects. Learn more fun facts at the Museum of Science.
pantoum
noun
a Malay verse form consisting of an indefinite number of quatrains with the second and fourth lines of each quatrain repeated as the first and third lines of the following one.
More about pantoum
Pantoum, “a Malay verse featuring repeated lines,” is a borrowing from French of Malay origin. Malay has two widely used standardized forms: Standard Malay, which is an official language in Malaysia and Singapore, and Indonesian, spoken by about 300 million people in Indonesia. Because Malay is a member of the Austronesian language family, it is distantly related to Hawaiian, Malagasy (in Madagascar), Maori (in New Zealand), and Tagalog (in the Philippines). The Malay source of pantoum is pantun, with the change from n to m because of a printer’s error in 19th-century France. Pantoum was first recorded in English in the early 1880s.
EXAMPLE OF PANTOUM USED IN A SENTENCE
The regular repetition of lines in pantoums means that poets have to be clever about context and meaning, or readers may find the verses rather stale.