Word of the Day:
penumbra
What It Means
A partially shaded area around the edges of a shadow, especially an eclipse.
A region around the edge of a sunspot, darker than the sun's surface but lighter than the middle of the sunspot.
An area of uncertainty or intermediacy between two mutually exclusive states or categories.
Penumbra in Context
“The other places see the penumbra of the moon's shadow fall on the earth, so the eclipse is partial, and part of the sun's disc is still visible.”
Did You Know?
From New Latin pēnumbra, from Latin paene (“almost”) + umbra (“shadow”).
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: penumbra (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the word and reformatted its meaning, examples and origin.
Cite this entry: “penumbra.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/penumbra. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
