Bathyspheres

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Spherical steel chambers lowered by cable into the deep ocean so that observers can view marine life and the seabed through small windows
2. Sealed round vessels designed to be lowered beneath the surface of the sea, allowing people inside to explore great depths safely
3. Strong globe-shaped submersible compartments used for deep-water observation, suspended from a ship and protected against crushing pressure

Etymology: The plural of "bathysphere," a spherical steel chamber lowered into the ocean on a cable so that people could look out at deep-sea creatures. The original device was not called a bathysphere at first: the name came decades after the first such chambers appeared in the 1890s, and it belongs to the 1930s, when William Beebe and Otis Barton's steel sphere, also called the Bathysphere, made record dives off Bermuda. That famous machine gave its name to the whole class of vessels, so a word for one particular object became a general noun. The word itself is built from two Greek elements. "Bathy-" comes from Greek "bathys," meaning "deep," and "-sphere" comes from Greek "sphaira," meaning "ball" or "globe." Put together, the term describes a globe made for the depths, a compound that is transparent in meaning once the parts are known.