Word.ws English Dictionary

Japetus

Japetus is the alternative spelling of Iapetus.

Meaning of Iapetus

Proper noun

Iapetus

  1. (Greek) A Titan, the son of Uranus and Gaia, and father of Atlas, Prometheus, Epimetheus, and Menoetius.
  2. A moon in Saturnian system, Solar System: The third largest moon of Saturn
    • We were unable to see enough on Saturn's moon Iapetus to really understand why that moon has one bright hemisphere and one dark.1990 August, Bradford A. Smith, “Voyage of the Century”, in National Geographic, volume 178, number 2, page 55
  3. A former ocean between former continent of Laurentia (North America) and former continent of Baltica (Europe): An ancient ocean which existed between 600 and 400 million years ago.
    • So, in the early Ordovician, Iapetus was wide enough to have one side in high latitudes and the other in the tropics: a massive ocean, indeed.2004, Richard Fortey, The Earth, Folio Society, published 2011, page 184
    Synonyms:
    Proto-Atlantic, Proto-Atlantic Ocean

Words formed from Japetus

Questions about Japetus

What is Japetus the alternative spelling of?
Japetus is the alternative spelling of Iapetus.

Words near Japetus in the dictionary

  1. japery
  2. japes
  3. japester
  4. japesters
  5. Japetian
  6. Japetus
  7. japeworthy
  8. JAPH
  9. Japhetan
  10. Japhetans
  11. Japheth

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Japetus (page history and authors); Iapetus (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: “Japetus.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/japetus. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.