A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1469 entries
phosphorescence
Phosphorescence is light emitted by a substance that has absorbed energy and is releasing it slowly, so it continues to glow after the source is removed. Glow-in-the-dark paint and star stickers are phosphorescent. The word is also used loosely and incorrectly by sailors for the light in a ship’s wake at night, which is not phosphorescence at all but bioluminescence produced by living organisms.
Etymology
The word is built on phosphorus, which is Greek for light-bearer, the same construction as the Latin lucifer and the same original meaning: the morning star. The element was named in 1669 by an alchemist who isolated it from urine while looking for gold and found a substance that glowed in the dark, and the word for the property then spread to anything that behaved that way.
Notes
The distinction between the three glowing words is worth keeping. Fluorescence stops the instant the light source is removed; phosphorescence continues for seconds, minutes, or hours; bioluminescence is a chemical reaction in a living thing and has nothing to do with absorbed light at all. Sea sparkle in a bow wave is the third of these.