Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. A celestial body that orbits the sun and is large enough to assume a nearly round shape, but that does not clear the neighborhood around its orbit and is not a satellite of a planet. See Usage Note at planet.
Wiktionary
- n. astronomy Any astronomical body which has achieved hydrostatic equilibrium (which is the shape a body of water would take, as opposed to a small Solar System body), orbits the Sun (as opposed to a moon), and has not "cleared its neighbourhood" of competing bodies (as opposed to a planet).
Examples
Sorry, no example sentences found.
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘dwarf planet’.
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wot, no?
miscellaneous words that weren't here till I added them
iraimbilanja, luma, lwei, emalangeni, laari, sene, maloti, lisente, ekuele, bipkwele, renegue, chaource and 123 more...
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Planets!
Types of planets.
gas giant, Jovian planet, hot Jupiter, terrestrial planet, rocky planet, iron planet, diamond planet, super-earth, circumbinary planet, double planet, mesoplanet, protoplanet and 26 more...
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New Oxford American - 2006 Word of th...
Won by carbon neutral
carbon neutral, CSA, DRM, dwarf planet, elbow bump, fishapod, funner, ghostriding, islamofascism, pregaming
Tweets
Looking for tweets for dwarf planet.
qroqqa The five objects that have so far been declared dwarf planets are Ceres, Pluto, Eris, Haumea, and Makemake.
The expression is grammatically unusual in that it is not a hyponym of its head: a dwarf planet is not a kind of planet. Most such expressions in English have to do with unreality of some kind (a fake Rembrandt is not a Rembrandt, a pretend dinosaur is not a dinosaur, an attempted coup is not a coup), or are lexically quirky (a Welsh rabbit is not a rabbit), or are named for rough biological resemblance (a sea anemone is not an anemone). Mar 27, 2009