# halcyon

Pronunciation: say "HAL-see-uhn" /ˈhælsi.ən/

## Adjective

1. Calm, peaceful and untroubled; often used of a happy, golden time remembered fondly, as in halcyon days.
   - Simple: Calm, peaceful and happy, often said of a time in the past that people remember fondly.
   - _Early employees look back fondly on the company's halcyon days, before the investors and deadlines arrived._
   - _The lake lay still beneath a halcyon sky, its surface barely stirred by the evening breeze._

## Noun

2. A kingfisher whose nesting by the sea, according to classical myth, made the gods hold back the wind and waves. *(literary)*
   - Simple: A kingfisher that, in old Greek and Roman stories, made the gods calm the wind and waves while it nested.
   - _In the myth, the gods held back every storm for as long as the halcyon sat on her nest by the shore._
   - _The mosaic shows two halcyons above a sea so smooth it looks like glass._

## Other meanings

- (noun) A tropical kingfisher belonging to the genus Halcyon, such as the woodland kingfisher (Halcyon senegalensis) of Africa.
- (adjective) Belonging or relating to the kingfisher, the bird also called the halcyon.
- (noun) The body of a dead kingfisher, said in Tudor times to work as a weather vane when hung from a beam.

## Origin

Inherited from Middle English alceoun, from Latin halcyōn or alcyōn ("kingfisher"), from Ancient Greek ἀλκυών (alkuṓn). The h was added in Greek and Latin through a folk link with háls ("sea") and kúō ("to conceive"), as if the bird were one that breeds on the sea.

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/halcyon (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).