black hole

Meanings

Noun

• A place of punitive confinement; a lockup or cell; a military guardroom.
• A gravitationally domineering celestial body with an event horizon from which even light cannot escape; the most dense material in the universe, condensed into a singularity, usually formed by a collapsing massive star.
• A void into which things disappear, or from which nothing emerges; an impenetrable area or subject; an area impervious to communication.
• A dangerous optical illusion that can occur on a nighttime approach with dark, featureless terrain between the aircraft and a brightly-lit runway, where the aircraft appears to the pilots to be higher up than it actually is, potentially triggering a premature or overly-steep descent and a crash short of the runway.
• A place where incoming traffic is silently discarded.
• A bit bucket; a place of permanent oblivion for data.

Verb

• To redirect (network traffic, etc.) nowhere; to discard (incoming traffic).

Related

Opposite words

• white hole

Narrower meaning words

• collapsar
• eternal black hole
• primordal black hole
• stellar black hole

Broader meaning words

• hole

Origin

• In reference to celestial bodies, physicist Hong-Yee Chiu attributed the term to his colleague , who stated around 1960–1961 that the objects were "like the Black Hole of Calcutta". The first known usage in print was by journalist Ann Ewing in 1964. Widespread popularisation of the term is generally credited to a 1967 lecture by physicist John Archibald Wheeler.{{cite-web
• |author = Tom Siegfried
• |authorlink =
• |title = 50 years later, it’s hard to say who named black holes
• |url = https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/context/50-years-later-it%E2%80%99s-hard-say-who-named-black-holes
• |archiveurl = https://www.webcitation.org/6ipAn6icl?url=https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/context/50-years-later-it%E2%80%99s-hard-say-who-named-black-holes
• |archivedate = 7 July 2016
• |work = ScienceNews
• |publisher = Society for Science
• |date = 2013-12-23
• |accessdate = 2016-07-07
• |passage =
• {{cite-web
• |author = Michael Quinion
• |authorlink =
• |title = Black Hole
• |url = http://www.worldwidewords.org/topicalwords/tw-bla1.htm
• |archiveurl = https://www.webcitation.org/6ipAve491?url=http://www.worldwidewords.org/topicalwords/tw-bla1.htm
• |archivedate = 7 July 2016
• |work = World Wide Words
• |publisher =
• |date = 2008-04-26
• |accessdate = 2016-07-07
• |passage =