The Eponym Series – Celsius
Hello,
Every writer who has submitted their work for publication, or even feedback and critique, knows the feeling. You press send, or drop the letter in the postbox (or mailbox), and then realise you’ve missed a comma, split an infinitive, or messed up in some way. It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve edited the piece, although of course that helps enormously and there are great tricks like reading it aloud, or backwards (yes really) which reduce the issue. It doesn’t matter how experienced you are. Something will be wrong. Some silly thing will have been missed. I know my writing isn’t perfect every time, or even most of the time. To err is human, and all that.
So when I wrote the Modern Vikings chapter in “Words The Vikings Gave Us” (my next word history book, due out later this year) I groaned upon discovering that the word celsius is eponymous. It’s not like I spent three years writing about and researching the people behind the eponyms in the English language. Or that I published a book on the subject which had a science chapter where celsius would have fitted perfectly.
Ah well. I may include it in a second edition one day, but in the meantime here’s the story of celsius and the man who gave us the most widely-used temperature scale in the world.
The Swedish astronomer Anders Celsius (1701-1744) invented the centigrade temperature scale in 1742. The Celsius scale, as it was renamed in 1948 in his honour, is used to measure temperatures in all countries except the United States, Bahamas, Belize, Cayman Islands, and Liberia. Its previous name, centigrade, was rooted in Latin – centum (a hundred) and gradus (steps).
The celsius scale is based on the freezing and boiling points for water – 0 degrees for freezing and 100 for boiling. Hence a warm summer day might be 20-35 degrees depending on your location and anything below zero will be literally “freezing outside”.
Celsius was best-known for his astronomy work but he was also a noted mathematician and physicist whose father and grandfather were renowned scientists. He was the first to notice a relationship between the aurora borealis and the Earth’s magnetic field, for example.
Until next time happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,
Grace (@Wordfoolery)
Interested in eponyms like celsius? I’ve written a book about nearly 300 of them and the lives of the fascinating people who gave their name to English. “How To Get Your Name In The Dictionary” is out now in Amazon paperback (USA and UK), and ebook for Kindle,, and on .
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