A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1054 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.
Notes
Volcanic dust makes the purple light extraordinary. After Krakatoa erupted in 1883, afterglows were reported vivid enough that fire brigades in the eastern United States turned out looking for the blaze.