Word.ws English Dictionary

cavorite

cavorite noun: a hypothetical substance with anti-gravity effects.

Noun

cavorite (uncountable)

  1. A hypothetical substance with anti-gravity effects.
    • “It seems to me it wouldn't cost much to cart any weight anywhere if you packed it in a Cavorite case.”1901, H. G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon, Chapter 3
    • “In the early years, they were the most primitive structures ever to fly in space, cheap and overbuilt and overcrewed, hoisted on cavorite wings.”1999, Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky, reprinted by Macmillan, published 2000, →ISBN, page 760

Origin of cavorite

From Cavor + -ite. Coined by British science fiction author H. G. Wells in 1901 in The First Men in the Moon. It was named after the fictional Dr. Cavor. The initial use was capitalized, but later authors borrowing the concept sometimes changed it to lowercase. In the first use, the metal acted as a gravity shield; after the metal was cooled, objects contained within it were no longer subject to gravity. Some later uses, e.g., Alan Moore's, imagine the substance to simply have a negative gravitational mass.

Questions about cavorite

What does cavorite mean?
Cavorite means a hypothetical substance with anti-gravity effects.
What part of speech is cavorite?
Cavorite is a noun.

Words near cavorite in the dictionary

  1. cavoliniids
  2. cavolo nero
  3. Cavoodle
  4. Cavoodles
  5. cavopulmonary
  6. cavorite
  7. cavort
  8. cavorted
  9. cavorter
  10. cavorters
  11. cavorteth

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cavorite (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “cavorite.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/cavorite. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.