Chernobyl

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A town in northern Ukraine near the border with Belarus ; the site of a catastrophic nuclear reactor accident in 1986
2. A small city in northern Ukraine ; the location of the 1986 nuclear power plant meltdown that released radiation across Europe
3. A northern Ukrainian town in the Kyiv region ; the scene of the worst nuclear power accident in history, which occurred in 1986

Etymology: Chernobyl is a town in northern Ukraine, and its name comes from the Ukrainian "Chornobyl," a cognate of the Russian "Černobyl'," which in turn derives from the Russian word for "mugwort" or "wormwood," a bitter plant that grew in the area. The town's name thus means something like "place of wormwood," and the English word for the place is borrowed from Russian. The name of a humble herb became a byword for catastrophe only through events in 1986, when the nuclear power plant near the town suffered a reactor explosion and fire. Because the plant bore the town's name, the place became an international shorthand for the disaster itself, and the word is now used as a noun for nuclear accidents and their aftermath.