• apogee •
Pronunciation: æp-ê-jee • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Noun
Meaning: 1. The point in an elliptical orbit around a planet when the satellite is farthest away from the planet, the antonym of perigee. 2. The zenith, pinnacle, highpoint.
Notes: Here is a word more often read than heard. It comes with three adjectives, apogeal, apogean, and, rarely, apogeic. It is akin to apogeotropic "turning away from the ground", said of leaves and other parts of plants.
In Play: We come across the literal sense of this word in sentences like this: "The first Sputnik had an apogee of one hundred twenty-five miles and a perigee of one hundred miles." However, it is available for expressions like this: "Miss Pell reached her intellectual apogee in high school."
Word History: Today's Good Word was, yet again, borrowed from French, which it inherited from its grandmother, Latin apogaeum, which borrowed it from Greek apogaios "far from earth. The Greek word comprises apo "(away) from" + gaia "earth". Apo derives from PIE apo "from, out (of)", whose traces we find in Sanskrit apa "off, away", Latin ab "from", Russian and other Slavic languages po "along, according to", Albanian pa "without", and English of and after. Gaia, a relative of the ge in geography, comes from the name of the Greek earth goddess, Gaia, of unknown origin. This word probably entered Greek from some non-Indo-European language. (Now a bow to Great Grand Panjandrum Jeremy Busch for using the adjective of today's remarkable Good Word in the Agora.)
