A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1350 entries
afterglow
The light that stays behind after the sun has gone. In meteorology it names something specific: a broad arch of pink or whitish light in the western sky, made of the purple light — strongest when the sun sits two to six degrees below the horizon — and the bright segment above it, which can hold until the end of nautical twilight. The same event before sunrise is a foreglow.
Etymology
A plain English compound of after and glow, the second from Old English glōwan, to shine as if red-hot, from the Proto-Indo-European root *ghel-, “to shine,” which also produced gold and yellow.
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