any member of a meteor shower occurring annually around August 12th, appearing to radiate from a point in the constellation Perseus and derived from comet Swift-Tuttle
Word origin
C19: from Greek Persēides daughters of Perseus1
Perseid in American English
(ˈpɜːrsiɪd)
noun
Astronomy
any of a shower of meteors appearing in August and radiating from a point in the constellationPerseus
Word origin
[1875–80; perse(us) + -id1, or directly ‹ Gk Perseídēs offspring of Perseus]This word is first recorded in the period 1875–80. Other words that entered Englishat around the same time include: graph, hat trick, neoclassic, overdraft, weekender-id is a suffix of nouns that have the general sense “offspring of, descendant of,” occurringoriginally in loanwords from Greek (Atreid; Nereid), and productive in English on the Greek model, esp. in names of dynasties, withthe dynasty’s founder as the base noun (Abbasid; Attalid), and in names of periodic meteor showers, with the base noun usually denoting theconstellation or other celestial object in which the shower appears (Perseid)