Sometimes words that describe the natural world come in a rather confusing clump. I’m hoping to explore many of these groups of words describing interrelated or similar concepts. Because one of the best-known meteor showers, the Perseids, is peaking this weekend, let’s start with the meteor family of words.

A meteor, of course, is that thin needle of light streaking through the night sky that we also know as a shooting star. Meteor showers occur when Earth passes through the swath of debris left by a comet. We’ve identified the comets that have spawned various meteor showers; the Perseids are the leftovers of Comet Swift-Tuttle. The showers themselves, by the way, are named for the constellation from which they appear to come, in this case Perseus.

Several other words are also used to describe interplanetary dust and fragments more precisely.

• A meteoroid is a bit of debris that would become a meteor if it entered Earth’s atmosphere. They’re much smaller than asteroids and range from tiny dust grains to pieces about one meter across—essentially the dust bunnies of the solar system on up to things the size of maybe a washing machine. Think of asteroids and planetoids and remember that all three are out in space.
• A meteorite is a meteor that survives its journey through the atmosphere. Most meteors are so small that they simply vaporize in the atmosphere, but the larger ones can make it down to the surface. Both meteorites and meteors add their mass to Earth’s; it’s hard to tell exactly how much mass this amounts to, but estimates range from 37,000 to 78,000 tons per year, most of it from tiny bits of dust.
• A particularly big, bright meteor is sometimes called a fireball. The best-known recent example of this is the spectacular fireball that streaked across the sky near Chelyabinsk, Russia in February 2013. A large meteor that explodes in the atmosphere is called a bolide, from a Greek word meaning missile. The Chelyabinsk meteor broke up in the atmosphere and was so large that it’s also called a super-bolide.
• Sporadic meteors are random bits of space debris that are not associated with a particular comet. They might be fragments of asteroids that broke up, or bits of the moon or Mars that were ejected during an impact. Some of the latter even make it down to the surface sometimes; enough of these have been identified as coming from Mars that they are classified into different types.

The next time you’re out under a dark sky and see a fleeting thread of light appear in the starry sky, remember that you’re watching the end of a long space odyssey, signaled by the tiny quiet flash of vaporization as a bit of space dust becomes part of Earth.

Learn more:

• The American Meteor Society has an informative site with the latest news on meteor showers and fireball sightings.
• Dr. Tony Irving of the University of Washington maintains a Martian meteorites page.

Most of the time, names arise mysteriously out of the collective creativity of language. Common names for plants and animals are a very rich source of information about them and their history of interaction with humans. One inspiration for this blog was a desire to learn where names like wormwood, sassafras, and lungwort came from. However, they have their limits. Is your moonflower or ironwood the same as mine? Maybe, maybe not. And consider things like Spanish moss, which is neither native to Spain nor a moss.

When scientists communicate with each other, they require clarity and a shared understanding of the names and categories of the things they talk about. Various professional societies for scientists have naming commissions or other bodies that agree on nomenclature in that field. For example, it was the International Astronomical Union that decided that Pluto is a dwarf planet. Although this demotion caused consternation in some circles, it wasn’t anything personal. It just reflects the current understanding of the contents of the solar system better. The idea is essentially to use the same name only for objects that not only resemble each other superficially, but that share deeper similarities and perhaps an evolutionary history.

The ultimate example of precision naming may be the binomial nomenclature used to give consistent names to plants and animals. Each name indicates the organism’s genus and species. The species name often reflects something about the organism (a word describing its appearance, say, or the name of the person who identified it as a species). Virginia creeper, for example, goes by Parthenocissus quinquefolia; it belongs to the genus Parthenocissus, and quinquefolia refers to the fact that the leaves (the folia bit) appear in groups of five (the quinque bit). In this blog, we’ll learn about how the genus names were established and also about some of the scientists and explorers whose names live on in scientific names.

As we learn more about the evolutionary history of an animal or a plant, the scientific name may change. Again, the goal is to group objects that truly are related in a meaningful way. I was surprised to learn that Virginia creeper is not Hedera quinquefolia, the first name I learned it by many years ago. That’s an older name that is synonymous with Parthenocissus quinquefolia (that is, it refers to the same thing) but is not used any more in scientific publications or databases. (The genus Hedera contains the ivies, and although Virginia creeper resembles an ivy in behavior, it turns out not to be particularly closely related to them.) You can see that scientific names are not quite as cut and dried as they may seem, but the goal is a clear unambiguous naming convention that reflects our best understanding of the natural world.

Even scientific names have some scope for whimsy, however. Asteroids and genes, which are generally named by their discoverers, are two good examples. Asteroids have been named for people from Pythagoras to Lennon and McCartney. There are asteroids named Paris, Potsdam, Cincinnati, Tahiti, and even Peruindiana (after a small town in Indiana, which by the way is generally pronounced PEE-roo). Some are named for fictional characters: Mr. Spock, James Bond, and Desdemona, for instance. There’s also one called Racquetball, and one called Vinifera (named by a wine lover, I assume). And speaking of wine, the zebrafish has a group of genes named for wines and a gene called moonshine that have to do with blood cell development and blood circulation, respectively.

So maybe it’s more accurate to say that all names arise out of the collective creativity of language, and that science tries to use names more precisely than we often do.

For more information, see:

• Pluto and the Developing Landscape of Our Solar System (the IAU’s description of the Pluto decision)
• Minor Planet Center list of asteroid names

I edit scientific papers; although my background is in astronomy, geology papers may be my favorite. I love the lingo of geology—greywacke, gneiss, drumlin, plagioclase feldspar, obsidian, alluvial fan—and I’ve always been curious about the origins of some of the more exotic terms. When I started to investigate them, I found that even common terms often have an interesting etymology.

Granite, for example, springs from the same root (so to speak) as corn—not necessarily the corn that we call corn today, but in the older sense, in which the word refers to the local grain crop. Granite has a granular texture, and the Latin word granum is the ultimate source of the words granite (from the past tense of the verb grano, “to make grainy”) and corn. All right, I thought, these geology words are well worth pursuing.

Then I was having lunch with my son a few days later and he told me that his then six-month-old son, a born kicker, had recently kicked him in the xiphoid process (a small bone spur in the chest). I sympathized, but at the same time, the phrase “kicked in the xiphoid process” made me giggle. (It could be hazardous if an adult were to kick you there; however, a xiphoid kick from a baby is an uncomfortable indignity but is not likely to be lethal.) And again I wondered, why do they call it the xiphoid process? How about the sigmoid process? What is a process, anyway?

One last story: I was sitting near some people at a coffeehouse and inadvertently overhearing their discussion; for some reason they needed to know whether a centrifugal force pulled inward or outward. One of them reasoned that because of the way a centrifuge works, it must go outward, which was an excellent way to approach the question. Another nice approach is to remember that the Latin root fugere means “to flee” (a mnemonic is the phrase “Tempus fugit,” which translates literally as “Time flees”), so under a centrifugal force, objects flee the center of a circle. We can also trace fugitive and refugee back to fugere.

Put all this together, and it occurred to me that learning more about the Latin, Greek, or other roots of scientific words and/or the stories of their origins is a great way to understand more about science and its history. Hence, this blog. I’m going to explore the answers to my questions about rocks, minerals, and processes, along with many other things, and share what I learn here. I hope this will be a helpful and entertaining site to anyone who is curious about science and wants to learn the stories behind the curious and often beautiful words it uses, as well as the history hidden behind very familiar words.

Science Word Geek is where my interests in words and science converge. I have a bachelor’s degree in astrophysics and a lot of experience editing scientific papers, where I still run into words I’ve never heard of or words that intrigue me.  I’ve also been a fan of the written word since I got my first library card at age 4.

More importantly, I think that understanding why things are named as they are and where scientific terms comes from can help make scientific knowledge more a part of anyone’s mental furniture. If you know some of the Greek, Latin, Arabic, and other roots, and some of the history of concepts and the scientists who formulated them (even the ones that turned out to be wrong), it’s easier to fit new scientific knowledge into the context you’ve built up in your mind.

Perhaps most importantly of all, science, like any human endeavor, is full of interesting characters and fascinating stories, and its language reflects this. The lingo also captures some of the thought processes that went into developing scientific knowledge, and the history of the times in which the terminology emerged. I hope you’ll be as entertained and enlightened by these stories as I am.