/ˌmiːtiəˈrɒlədʒi/
[noun] The scientific study of the atmosphere, especially the weather and how it changes. Meteorologists use data from the air, clouds, and temperature to make weather forecasts.
The Ancient Greeks believed weather was caused by objects falling from the sky — so they called it 'meteor,' meaning 'thing in the air.'
The story of meteorology begins high above the ground — quite literally. The word traces back to the ancient Greek word 'meteōron,' which meant 'thing lifted up' or 'phenomenon in the sky.' This came from two Greek parts: 'meta,' meaning 'beyond' or 'above,' and 'aeirein,' meaning 'to lift' or 'to raise.' For the Greeks, anything moving or appearing in the atmosphere — rain, hail, lightning, shooting stars, even comets — was a 'meteōron,' a thing suspended between earth and heaven.
This thinking gave us one of the oldest scientific texts in history. Around 340 BCE, the philosopher Aristotle wrote a work called 'Meteorologica,' in which he tried to explain all atmospheric and celestial phenomena using reason rather than mythology. He discussed clouds, wind, rain, thunder, earthquakes, and even the Milky Way under this single umbrella. The work was not perfect by modern standards — Aristotle believed earthquakes were caused by winds trapped underground — but it was an extraordinary attempt to organize nature through observation. His title gave the entire field its name.
The Greek 'meteōron' passed into Medieval Latin as 'meteorum,' and scholars across Europe who studied Aristotle's text began using 'meteorologia' to describe the discipline itself. The suffix '-logia' came from the Greek 'logos,' meaning 'word,' 'reason,' or 'study of,' a suffix that also gave English biology (Greek 'bios' → Latin 'biologia' → English biology), geology (Greek 'gē' → Latin 'geologia' → English geology), and dozens of other scientific names. The full chain for our word runs: Greek 'meteōron' + 'logia' → Medieval Latin 'meteorologia' → French 'météorologie' → English 'meteorology.'
English adopted the word in the late 16th century, first appearing in texts around 1570, when European scholars were rediscovering and translating ancient Greek works. At first, the word still carried the wide, Aristotelian meaning — it covered everything from rainbows and thunder to comets and auroras. Over the following two centuries, as science became more specialized and instruments like the thermometer and barometer were invented, meteorology slowly narrowed its focus to the atmosphere and weather specifically. Astronomy claimed the stars; geology claimed the earth; meteorology kept the air.
Interestingly, the word 'meteor' itself — which most people today associate only with rocks flying through space — was once the broader term for any atmospheric event. Rain was a 'watery meteor,' lightning was a 'fiery meteor,' and a rainbow was a 'luminous meteor.' It was only in the 19th century that 'meteor' settled into its modern, narrow meaning of a streak of light caused by a rock burning up in the atmosphere. This is why the science of weather kept the old name: meteorology had been studying 'meteora' — things in the sky — long before anyone distinguished between weather and space rocks. The word carries centuries of wonder about the air above us, a reminder that for most of human history, sky and science were almost the same thing.