The meaning of the word "atmosphere" in various dictionaries

2024 Author: Henry Conors | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-12 02:46

The word "atmosphere" is known to everyone since school days. But what exactly does it mean and how to use it correctly in speech? The designation of this word is present in many well-known dictionaries. Let's consider them in more detail. In addition to the well-known explanatory dictionary, there are the following types: phraseological, astronomical, encyclopedic, etc. Each of them contains the word given word.

Explanatory Dictionary

The most popular for recognizing the designations of various words, of course, is an explanatory dictionary. The word "atmosphere" in the explanatory dictionary stands for an air or gaseous shell around the surface of the Earth and some other nearby planets. This is the designation of the word in its truest sense. But it also has a figurative meaning. In this case, this term will denote a tense situation, a moral situation at a particular moment.

Vladimir Ivanovich Dal in describing the meaning of the word "atmosphere" included not only the shell of the earth's surface, but also clouds and all terrestrial evaporation.

Phraseological and encyclopedicdictionaries

The Phraseological Dictionary provides designations for words and terms used for simple speech. Here, the figurative meaning of the word "atmosphere" is used, giving the designation of a tense situation, a difficult oppressive situation, or opposite a fun event, a holiday. For example: “There was a tense atmosphere around” or “There was a festive atmosphere in the apartment.”

In the encyclopedic dictionary, the atmosphere is a unit for measuring the pressure of air, water or gas. This meaning of the word is widely used in a science such as physics.

The word "atmosphere" in astronomy

The encyclopedic designation of the concept of the atmosphere is almost completely analogous to its meaning in the explanatory dictionary. The word atmosphere is derived from two Greek words: atmos - "steam" and sphaira - "ball" - and means an air shell that surrounds the surface of the entire globe and revolves around it together with the Sun.

Astronomical meaning also denotes a gaseous shell located not only on the surface of the planet Earth, but also on such celestial bodies as the Sun, stars and other planets of the solar system.

Earth's atmosphere consists mostly of oxygen and a gas such as nitrogen. But the atmospheres of other planets mainly have other components in their composition, for example, Saturn and Jupiter from methane, helium and hydrogen. The atmosphere, which consists mainly of carbon dioxide, is characteristic of Venus and Mars.