Definitions
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun In ornithology, the only genus of Phaëthontidæ.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun (Class. Myth.) The son of Helios (Phœbus), that is, the son of light, or of the sun. He is fabled to have obtained permission to drive the chariot of the sun, in doing which his want of skill would have set the world on fire, had he not been struck with a thunderbolt by Jupiter, and hurled headlong into the river Po.
- noun (Zoöl.) A genus of oceanic birds including the tropic birds.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- proper noun A taxonomic
genus within thefamily Phaethontidae —tropicbirds . - proper noun Alternative form of
Phaëthon .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun (Greek mythology) son of Helios; killed when trying to drive his father's chariot and came too close to earth
- noun type genus of the Phaethontidae
Etymologies
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Examples
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As the story opens, rebellious Phaethon is chided by most citizens for an inexcusable atrocity he imposed on mankind.
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BRIEF SYNOPSIS: In an interplanetary Utopian society, Phaethon is a rebel who must reclaim his identity that was lost via memory manipulation.
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They are likely dust particles from an asteroid named 3200 Phaethon, which is unusual.
Geminid meteor shower tonight -- best shower of the year Melissa Bell 2010
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What looks like a series of cascading lights is actually the ice and dust debris from an extinct comet known as Phaethon whose ice melted after a series of close shaves with the
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[193] Euripides '"Phaethon," which exists only in fragments.
Plutarch's Morals 46-120? Plutarch
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Instead, it's an asteroid, a chunk of rock roughly 5 kilometres across called Phaethon (pronounced
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But in the case of Barack Obama, our modern Phaethon, his fiery crash is coming after 32, not 96, months.
Notable & Quotable 2011
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Even if 3200 Phaethon is a clump of rock bits, which is one kind of asteroid, the Geminids are many hundreds of years old, so those bits should have long since been lost, and yet they are still throwing stuff off.
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Exactly why 3200 Phaethon has so much material trailing behind it to burn up in our atmosphere is unclear.
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In the case of the Geminid shower, they're tiny pieces of debris breaking off an asteroid called 3200 Phaethon as it orbits the sun.
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