Zeniths

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /ˈzɛn.ɪθs/

Definitions

1. The highest point reached in a celestial body’s apparent path across the sky
2. A peak or culmination in a personal or professional journey
3. The most successful or influential period in a person's life or in a particular field

Etymology: The plural here follows the noun's own history: "zenith" started as a point in the sky and only later became a figure for a height of achievement. The sky sense comes from Arabic astronomy. Medieval Latin "cenit" was borrowed from the Arabic "samt", meaning "direction" or "path", drawn from the fuller phrase "samt ar-ra's", "direction of the head", which is the point directly overhead. Scholars writing in Latin passed the word on, and it reached Middle English as "cenyth". The spelling shift from "cenit" to "zenith" is a puzzle. The "-ni-" in the Latin form probably came from a misreading of the Arabic letter "m", whose three strokes look like a run of "n" letters. Whether this is the true cause or just a phonetic approximation is uncertain, but it explains why the English word looks so unlike its source. Because "zenith" names the highest point of the sky, the figurative sense of a peak of success or power grew naturally from it, and the plural "zeniths" simply refers to several such summits.

Synonyms: peaks, summits, apices, climaxes, pinnacles

Antonyms: nadir, low point, bottom, depths, base