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Definitions

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

  1. n. A meteoric fireball.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

  1. n. A brilliant meteor.

Wiktionary

  1. n. Any extraterrestrial body that collides with Earth
  2. n. An extremely bright meteor
  3. n. A fireball

GNU Webster's 1913

  1. n. A kind of meteor; a bolis.

WordNet 3.0

  1. n. an especially luminous meteor (sometimes exploding)

Etymologies

  1. From French bolide, from Latin bolis. (Wiktionary)
  2. French, from Latin bolis, bolid-, kind of meteor, from Greek, missile, flash (of lightning), from ballein, to throw; see gwelə- in Indo-European roots. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)

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  • treeseed The word bolide comes from the Greek βολις, (bolis) which can mean a missile or to flash. The IAU has no official definition of bolide and generally considers the term synonymous with fireball. The term is more often used among geologists than astronomers where it means a very large impactor. For example, the USGS uses the term to mean a generic large crater forming projectile "to imply that we do not know the precise nature of the impacting body ... whether it is a rocky or metallic asteroid, or an icy comet, for example". Astronomers tend to use the term to mean an exceptionally bright fireball, particularly one that explodes (sometimes called a detonating fireball).
    _Wikipedia Feb 23, 2008

  • fbharjo bolide ball of fire (meteor) Jan 29, 2007

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‘bolide’ has been looked up 1890 times, added to 17 lists, commented on 2 times, and has a Scrabble score of 9.