meteor

The word 'meteor' entered English in the late 15th century via Middle French 'météore', from Medieval Latin 'meteora', which itself originated from the Greek plural noun 'meteōra', meaning "things in the air" or "celestial phenomena." This Greek term is the neuter plural of 'meteōros', signifying "lofty" or "raised high in the air," derived from the verb 'meteōrein' ("to raise up"). The semantic logic traces from the ancient Greek concept of atmospheric and astronomical events—anything observed high in the sky—to the modern, more specific scientific meaning. Over centuries, the term narrowed from encompassing all atmospheric phenomena (like rain, hail, and comets) to refer specifically to the luminous trail of a space particle and the particle itself.

The word is a simplex loanword from Greek. It cannot be meaningfully segmented into morphemes that are direct substrings of its modern English spelling while preserving clear semantic links to its components.