sun
/sʌn
/- Venus orbits around the sun faster than the earth, which also has a longer distance to cover.
- In 1705 Halley showed that the comet, which is now called after him, moved in an elliptical orbit round the sun.
- Copernicus must surely have had it in mind when he came up with the idea that the earth orbited the sun.
- Remember, our solar system is contained within the Milky Way galaxy which in turn is comprised of many other planets, suns and stars!
- Astronomers hope to study the structure and evolution of the Universe, and to search for planetary systems around other suns.
Synonyms
The sun is the central body of the solar system. It provides the light and energy that sustains life on earth, and its changing position relative to the earth’s axis determines the terrestrial seasons. The sun is a star of a type known as a G2 dwarf, a sphere of hydrogen and helium 1.4 million km in diameter which obtains its energy from nuclear fusion reactions deep within its interior, where the temperature is about 15 million degrees. The surface is a little under 6,000°C.
- Plant it in an area which receives full sun, digging it into soil which has been improved with the addition of compost and manure.
- Buy them in bloom, and plant them in full sun (light afternoon shade in hot climates).
- It compensated for standing in the hot sun without proper food or water for five days!
Synonyms
- There is little doubt that Erris deserve their day in the sun but what made this victory extra special was the manner in which it was achieved.
- The sun of the Roman Empire set, so to speak, in the East, and it is to Byzantium we must turn our eyes for the continuation of the art of horsemanship as of the Fine Arts.
- When the sun of the Stuarts set forever on the bloody plain of Culloden, Prince Charlie fled the stricken field with a few followers to the mountain fastnesses of Scotland.
- After many suns the fighting stopped and the people came back again, but the beautiful valley of the great river was all changed.
- Five suns passed, and still another five suns had risen and set, and yet no braves returned.
- Before any more suns set, before opportunists destroy the ethical science-based practice of medicine, before our children abandon the dream of practicing medicine, let us pledge to stand shoulder to shoulder and march forward toward our goal.
- For the Indian security forces, whose speedboats, armed with heavy machine guns, cruised past visitors sunning themselves on the lake's famous house boats, the coming of summer means just one thing: the start of the fighting season.
- Tuck into clotted cream and freshly baked scones while sunning yourself on the terrace overlooking the beach.
- While other children were sunning themselves on beaches in Brittany or sending postcards from Greece, we were getting drenched at Culloden or counting midge-bites by Loch Arkaig.
Synonyms
- This can actually lessen the burden of sunning the plants once a while.
- Like many other Shanghai residents, housewife Sheng Chongming has sunned clothes and quilts from her balcony for dozens of years.
- I've seen one neighbor's cat writhing around on the sidewalk and yowling while my cat sunned his fat stomach in our driveway, unfazed.
Phrases
against the sun
catch the sun
make hay while the sun shines
on which the sun never sets
shoot the sun
under the sun
with the sun
Derivatives
sunlike
- The discovery will lend support to the idea that almost every sunlike star in our galaxy, and probably the Universe, is accompanied by planets.
- By recording the motion of the sunlike star HD 70642 for 5 years, scientists have discerned that an unseen planet at least twice as massive as Jupiter is tugging on it.
- The new picture for the first time resolves faint, sunlike stars in a galaxy other than the Milky Way.
sunward
- But by monitoring conditions in space on the sunward side of Earth, and by modeling what the varying solar wind will do to the magnetic field, power grid operators can steal 30 minutes of preparation time, Kappenman says.
- One brings us back to Brooklyn: it is called Spring Yellows, Botanic Gardens and shows weedy tangles of wildflowers lifting their leaves sunward as spring advances and winter's dolor is shucked off for another year.
- Certain fish species are known to orient and migrate using a solar compass, but it is not known whether any species employ sunward orientation as a cryptic strategy.
sunwards
- Here, in the north pavilion is a sliding door which opens on to a big verandah that looks out sunwards into the bush over a small area cleared for evening barbecues.
- But the further sunwards it goes, the bigger it has to be to provide the same amount of shielding.
- The period remains constant with height but the amplitude decreases as the wave travels sunwards.
Origin
Old English sunne, of Germanic origin; related to Dutch zon and German Sonne, from an Indo-European root shared by Greek hēlios and Latin sol.
An Old English word whose root was related to the Latin and Greek words for sun, sol (see solar) and hēlios. People say the sun is over the yardarm when they think that the time of day has been reached when it is socially acceptable to drink alcohol. This is an old nautical expression which goes back to the late 19th century. A yardarm is the end section of a yard, a thick tapering pole slung across a ship's mast for a sail to hang from. At certain times of year the sun rises far enough up the sky to show above the topmost yardarm. In summer in the north Atlantic, where the phrase seems to have originated, this would have been at about 11 a.m., which was the time of the first rum issue of the day—not 6 in the evening, as is often thought. The earliest known example of the phrase comes from a series of travel articles by Rudyard Kipling, published under the title From Sea to Sea (1899): ‘The American does not drink at meals as a sensible man should…Also he has no decent notions about the sun being over the yard-arm or below the horizon.’ A sundowner is a different matter altogether. In colonial days, especially in South Africa, it was a drink taken at sunset, whereas in Australia it was a tramp who arrived at a sheep station around sundown and pretended to be seeking work, to get food and a night's lodging. The phrase there is nothing new under the sun is biblical, from the Book of Ecclesiastes: ‘The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.’ People only seem to have sunbathed since the 1940s—before that the usual term was sunbath or, in Australia and New Zealand, sunbake. See also son