Copyright © Philip M. Parker, INSEAD. Terms of Use.
Definition: Democritus |
DemocritusNoun1. Greek philosopher who developed an atomistic theory of matter (460-370 BC). Source: WordNet 1.7.1 Copyright © 2001 by Princeton University. All rights reserved. |
"Democritus" is a name that signifies or is derived from: "a critic of the people". |
Date "Democritus" was first used in popular English literature: sometime before 1321. (references) |
| Context | Synonyms within Context (source: adapted from Roget's Thesaurus). |
Rejoicing | Momus; Democritus the Abderite; rollicker. |
| Source: adapted from Roget's Thesaurus. | |
(From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia)
Stamp issued by Greece on Sept. 26, 1983, to honor an International Conference on Democritus and his work
Democritus was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher (born at Abdera in Thrace around 460 BC; lived to be very old, but died at an unknown date). Democritus was a student of Leucippus, and co-originator of the belief that all matter is made up of various imperishable indivisible elements which he called atoms. It is virtually impossible to tell which of these ideas were unique to Democritus, and which are attributable to Leucippus. Democritus is also the first philosopher we know who realized that what we perceive as the Milky Way is the light of distant stars. Other philosophers, including later Aristotle, argued against this. Democritus was among the first to propose that the universe contains many worlds, some of them inhabited:
Democritus agreed that everything which is must be eternal, but denied that "the void" can be equated with nothing. This makes him the first thinker on record to argue for the existence of an entirely empty "void". In order to explain the change around us from basic, unchangeable substance he argued that there are various basic elements which always existed but can be rearranged into many different forms. He argued that atoms only had several properties, particularly size, shape, and mass; all other properties that we attribute to matter, such as color and taste, are but the result of complex interactions between the atoms in our bodies and the atoms of the matter that we are examining. Furthermore, he believed that the real properties of atoms determine the perceived properties of matter--for example, something that tastes sharp is made of small, pointy atoms, while something sweet is made of large, round atoms; the interactions of those atoms with the atoms of the tongue give the impression of taste. Some types of matter are particularly solid because their atoms have hooks to attach to each other; some are oily because they are made of very fine, small atoms which can easily slip past each other. In Democritus' own words, "By convention sweet, by convention bitter, by convention hot, by convention cold, by convention colour: but in reality atoms and void."
External Links
Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia under a copyleft GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) from the article "Democritus."
Crosswords: Democritus |
| English words defined with "Democritus": Atomic philosophy ♦ Doctrine of atoms ♦ The Abderite. (references) |
| Specialty definitions using "Democritus": Democritos. (references) |
| Etymologies containing "Democritus": Abderian. (references) |
| Domain | Usage | |
Clever | Whatever is, is right. (references; author: Democritus) Hope of ill gain is the beginning of loss. (references; author: Democritus) By desiring little, a poor man makes himself rich. (references; author: Democritus) The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged. (references; author: Democritus) If thou suffer injustice, console thyself; the true unhappiness is in doing it. (references; author: Democritus) | |
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | ||
| Domain | Title |
Books |
|
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | |
| Thumbnail | Description & Credit |  | Democritus Junior to the Reader.Credit: National Library of Medicine. |
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | |||
| Author | Quotation |
Democritus | Whatever is, is right. |
| Hope of ill gain is the beginning of loss. | |
| By desiring little, a poor man makes himself rich. | |
| The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged. | |
| If thou suffer injustice, console thyself; the true unhappiness is in doing it. | |
| Happiness resides not in possessions, and not in gold, happiness dwells in the soul. | |
| The first principles of the universe are atoms and empty space; everything else is merely thought to exist. | |
Source: compiled by the editor from various references. | |
| "Democritus" is generally used as a noun (plural) -- approximately 50.00% of the time. "Democritus" is used about 22 times out of a sample of 100 million words spoken or written in English. Its rank is based on over 700,000 words used in the English language. Some parts-of-speech are not covered due to the samples used by the British National Corpus. (note: percents less than one-hundredth of one percent have been omitted) |
| Parts of Speech | Percent | Usage per 100 Million Words | Rank in English |
| Noun (plural) | 50% | 11 | 106,044 |
| Noun (proper) | 36.36% | 8 | 124,375 |
| Noun (singular) | 13.64% | 3 | 202,518 |
| Total | 100.00% | 22 | N/A |
Source: compiled by the editor from several corpora; see credits.
Expression using "Democritus": democritus the Abderite. Additional references. | |
| Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. |
| The following statistics estimate the number of searches per day across the major English-language search engines as identified by various trade publications. Hyperlinks lead to commercial use of the expression at Amazon.com. |
| Expression | Frequency per Day |
democritus | 70 |
democritus picture | 4 |
atomic democritus theory | 3 |
biography democritus | 2 |
atom democritus | 2 |
| Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | |
| Language | Translations for "Democritus"; alternative meanings/domain in parentheses. | ||||
Greek | δημόκριτοσ. (various references) | ||||
Pig Latin | emocritusday | ||||
Scrabble® Enable2K-Verified Anagrams | |
| Words within the letters "c-d-e-i-m-o-r-s-t-u" | |
-1 letter: costumier, courtside, midcourse, misrouted. | |
-2 letters: citreous, cordites, costumed, costumer, crudites, curdiest, curtsied, customer, decorums, demotics, diestrum, dimerous, domestic, eductors, misroute, moisture, morticed, mortices, mortised, outcried, outcries, outrides, outsider. | |
-3 letters: ceriums, cestoid, citrous, coedits, cordite, costume, coursed, courted, couters, credits, crudest, cruised, crusted, curites, decorum, demotic, detours, dictums, dimouts, directs, distome, dormice, dourest, dustier. | |
| Words containing the letters "c-d-e-i-m-o-r-s-t-u" | |
+2 letters: computerised, discomfiture, misconstrued, reductionism. | |
+3 letters: discomfitures, documentaries, documentarist, reductionisms, semiconductor. | |
+4 letters: discouragement, documentarians, documentarists, semiconductors. | |
+5 letters: countermelodies, discouragements, echinodermatous, semidocumentary. | |
| Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. SCRABBLE® is a registered trademark. All intellectual property rights in and to the game are owned in the U.S.A and Canada by Hasbro Inc., and throughout the rest of the world by J.W. Spear & Sons Limited of Maidenhead, Berkshire, England, a subsidiary of Mattel Inc. Mattel and Spear are not affiliated with Hasbro. | |
Hexadecimal (or equivalents, 770AD-1900s) (references)44 65 6D 6F 63 72 69 74 75 73 |
| Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519; backwards) (references)
|
| American Sign Language (origins from 1620-1817 in Italy and, especially, France) (references)
|
| Semaphore (1791, in France) (references)
|
| Braille (1829, in France) (references)
|
Morse Code (1836) (references)-.. . -- --- -.-. .-. .. - ..- ... |
| Dancing Men (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1903) (references)
|
Binary Code (1918-1938, probably earlier) (references)01000100 01100101 01101101 01101111 01100011 01110010 01101001 01110100 01110101 01110011 |
HTML Code (1990) (references)D e m o c r i t u s |
ISO 10646 (1991-1993) (references)0044 0065 006D 006F 0063 0072 0069 0074 0075 0073 |
| British Sign Language (Fingerspelling, BSL; 1992, British Deaf Association Dictionary of British Sign Language) (references)
|
Encryption (beginner's substitution cypher): (references)38717981698475868785 |
| 1. Definition 2. Crosswords 3. Usage: Modern 4. Usage: Commercial | 5. Images: Photo Album 6. Quotations: Familiar 7. Usage Frequency 8. Expressions | 9. Expressions: Internet 10. Translations: Modern 11. Anagrams 12. Orthography | 13. Bibliography |
Copyright © Philip M. Parker, INSEAD. Terms of Use.
