This is a case for a word detective so polish up your magnifying glass, open your note book, sharpen your pencil and set up a dictionary. It must be a big, unabridged dictionary which gives the origin or derivations of the words. When you know the ancestors of the words meteor and meteorite, you can keep them straight in your mind forever and ever.

The words meteor, meteorite and meteorology seem to be related  and so they are. At least they descended from the same origins or ancestor words. Their family tree began before the Age of Science became specialized in so many separate fields. When this happened, the original ancestor word was borrowed by the weathermen, the astronomers and the geologists. It was adapted and given different meanings in each of these studies.

A big dictionary will tell you that the original meaning of the word meteor was something raised above the ground. This, of course, means up in the air where there are clouds and storms, auroras and shooting stars, fireballs and streaks of lightning. Originally, the word meteor was any spectacular event happening high above the ground. It could be a weather event, such as lightning, or an astronomical event, such as a fireball.

The weather, of course, occurs entirely in the lower atmosphere above the ground. It seemed logical to the weathermen to claim the original word meteor and add ology, meaning a science. They named their favorite study meteorology   and a weatherman is a meteorologist.

The astronomers also claimed the word meteor, but they no longer used it to explain the dazzling aurora.

They gave it a specialized meaning and nowadays a meteor is a flaming fireball, a bursting bolide or merely the bright, arching spark we call a falling star. All these meteors are space traveling lurmps or specks of matter which have collided with the earth and caught fire on their plunge through the atmosphere.

Host meteors are small specks which burn to ashes in the air. A few are big enough to land on the earth   where they enter the realm of geology. In geology, calcite and cryolite, zincite and jadeite are minerals   and a meteorite is a lump of mineral which was once a blazing meteor in the air.'

These grounded space travelers are interesting to both geologists and astronomers. Geologists say that some meteorites are mostly stony minerals like those of the earths crust, others are made of metals perhaps like those in the earth's core. Astronomers can deduce some of their space history, but so far they cannot prove why some meteorites are stony and some metallic.