Arrakis

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The fictional desert planet at the center of Frank Herbert's Dune novels, known for its scarce water and valuable spice ; a sandy world whose harsh environment and melange production drive the political conflicts of the saga
2. Herbert's arid fictional planet where the precious spice is harvested ; the barren desert world that serves as the setting for the Dune stories and their struggles over resources
3. A barren, sand-covered imaginary world in the science fiction series by Frank Herbert ; a harsh desert planet whose spice output makes it the focus of galactic power struggles

Etymology: Arrakis is the desert planet at the center of Frank Herbert's 1965 novel "Dune," and the name was chosen by Herbert himself rather than drawn from any existing language. Its most cited inspiration is the Arab-world word for "arak," a name shared by several plants, including the salt bush and the toothbrush tree, which Herbert reportedly came across in a historical or botanical source while building the desert world's ecology. Herbert also described the planet's name as having an Arabic-sounding quality without being a direct borrowing, and that is the reading most often repeated, though his exact source is not firmly documented. The name's real importance is that it was invented to sound plausible across the book's invented cultures, which Herbert drew partly from Arabic, Bedouin, and Persian sources. Arrakis was never a word in any natural language, so there is no older meaning to recover. Its first appearance is in the novel's first serialized form, published in magazine installments in 1963 and 1964 before the 1965 book.