It's Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for September 16th.

Today's word is nebula spelled ne b u l a nebula is a noun it's a large cloud of

interstellar gas or dust in non-technical use the word ne nebula also refers to a galaxy other than the Milky Way.

Here's the word used in a sentence from popsi.com.

Like clouds, the shapes of our galaxy's glittery nebulae are sometimes in the eye of the beholder.

They can look like all sorts of animals, tarantula's crabs, a running chicken, and now a cosmic coy swimming through space.

The history of the word nebula belongs not to the mists of time, but to the mists of Latin. In that language, Nebula means mist or cloud.

In its earliest English uses in the 1600s, Nebula was chiefly a medical term that could refer either to a cloudy formation in

urine or to a cloudy speck or film on the eye.

Nebula was first applied to great interstellar clouds of gas and dust in the early 1700s.

The adjective nebulous comes from the same Latin root as nebula and it is considerably older being first used as a synonym of cloudy or foggy as early as the

1300s. Like Nebula, this adjective was not used in astronomical senses until centuries later.

With your word of the day, I'm Peter Sokolowski.

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