Origin Story
A comet streaks across the night sky — and hidden in its English name, surprisingly, is hair. When the ancient Greeks saw the long, trailing tail of light a comet cast, it struck them as a head of long hair streaming in the wind. Since their word for hair was kome, they called this celestial body aster kometes — "the long-haired star." Over time, aster ("star") fell away and only kometes remained, passing through Latin to become the English comet. So every time we watch a comet, we are really watching a "hair star." The poetic imagination of the ancients still lives on inside the word.
That same Greek kome ("hair") survives in the astronomical term coma — the glowing cloud of gas surrounding a comet's nucleus. The image of hair is still alive today.
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Online Etymology Dictionarycomet (n.): from Greek (aster) kometes, literally "long-haired (star)," from kome "hair of the head," so called from resemblance of a comet's tail to streaming hair
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Oxford English Dictionarycomet: from Greek kometes "long-haired," from kome "hair," referring to the comet's tail
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Merriam-Webster Dictionaryfrom Greek kometes, literally "long-haired," from koman to wear long hair, from kome hair
Word Evolution
Words from the Same Root
Memory Hook
Hidden inside "comet" is kome ("hair"). Remember it as "the star with long hair streaming behind it."
""In a comet's tail, the ancients saw a single strand of long hair streaming in the wind.""
