Astronaut

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /ˈæstɹəˌnɔːt/

Definitions

1. A person trained to travel and operate in spacecraft or perform activities in the environment beyond Earth's atmosphere
2. A trained human explorer who travels through space, operates spacecraft, and conducts activities in the vacuum beyond Earth
3. A specially prepared individual qualified to navigate outer space, pilot or manage spacecraft systems, and work in the weightless environment surrounding planets

Etymology: The word was built from two Greek roots, "astron" meaning "star" and "nautes" meaning "sailor," so its literal sense is something like "star-sailor." Ancient Greeks had no such word, since spaceflight was far beyond their imagination. The combining form "astro-" and the element "-naut" were both available to English speakers through classical vocabulary, and the coinage drew on the older "nautes" that also gave us "nautical" and "argonaut," the legendary sailors of the ship Argo. The "-naut" ending gives the word its sea-going flavour, and it was modelled on that older pattern. Early in the twentieth century, writers and engineers looking for a name for people who travelled beyond Earth's atmosphere reached for this classical toolkit, and "astronaut" stuck. Its French and Russian counterparts followed a similar path, though the English term became the most widely used.

Synonyms: space traveler, cosmonaut