sphere
Pluralspheres
Verbspheres, sphering, sphered
Pluralspheres
Formsspheres, sphering, sphered
- 1A round object that has the shape of a ball.
The sculptor balanced a polished stone sphere on the pedestal.
Tiny metal spheres rolled across the workbench when the jar tipped.
Similarorb
Note
The everyday use, for anything ball-shaped, from a marble to a world. Milton's sun is "a mighty sphere," and Piers Sellers, writing in The Guardian in 2011, describes how "it sinks in that the world is a sphere." Unlike the mathematician's surface, this sense means the whole solid object. Orb is its close synonym.
- 2The area of activity or influence that belongs to a particular person or thing.
Like a kingdom where each ruler governs their own territory.
Foreign policy fell outside the minister's usual sphere of responsibility.
Each department guards its own sphere within the company.
Similarfield, area, sector, orbit
Note
The figurative sense most readers meet first, and it lives in fixed phrases: sphere of influence, sphere of responsibility, public and private spheres. Bertrand Russell describes an older belief that each thing or person had "its or his proper sphere, to overstep which is 'unjust'." That moral edge, the idea of a limit one should not cross, still clings to the word. Field and area lack that edge.
- 3A surface in three dimensions made up of all the points that lie the same distance from a center point.
Each point on the sphere lies exactly five centimeters from its center.
To find the surface area of a sphere, the students used the radius.
Note
Strictly a surface, not a solid. The sphere is the skin, and the volume inside it is a separate thing. Its area is 4πr², and it encloses a volume of (4/3)πr³. The word came through Latin from Greek sphaîra, "ball, globe", whose origin is unknown. It is unrelated to Persian sepehr, "sky", despite the resemblance.
- 4The set of all points in three-dimensional space that lie a fixed distance from a fixed point.
In geometry, a sphere is every point that sits the same distance from one center point.
Every sphere in this space shares the same center but differs in radius.
Note
Geometry's precise version, which topology extends to any number of dimensions. In that wider setting the sphere is named by the dimension of its own surface. The familiar sphere in three-dimensional Euclidean space is therefore the 2-sphere. A circle is the 1-sphere, and higher spheres follow the same pattern. Only the distance from a fixed point defines it, not the space it sits in.
- 5The area of activity assigned to a planet, or by extension the area of influence belonging to a god or hero.
Ancient astrologers assigned each planet a sphere of activity in the cosmos.
Among the old gods, the sea fell within Poseidon's sphere of power.
Similardomain, realm, province
Note
This sense is the bridge from cosmology to everyday speech. A planet's sphere was the region it governed in astrological and classical thought. The word then passed to gods and heroes as the realm their power covered. From there it was a short step to the ordinary "domain" meaning, which keeps the image of a bounded territory of influence.
- 6The natural, normal, or proper place where something belongs.
Returned to the quiet of the library, she felt back in her natural sphere.
A wild animal kept in a cage is removed from its proper sphere.
Similarelement
Note
This sense is about belonging rather than activity. It usually appears in phrases like "in one's sphere," meaning where one fits naturally. It sits close to "in one's element," and element is its nearest synonym. To tell it apart from the "domain" meaning, ask whether the phrase describes a place you belong or a territory you act in.
- 7Any of the concentric hollow transparent globes once believed to rotate around the Earth and carry the heavenly bodies.
Medieval thinkers held that each sphere turned at its own steady pace around the Earth.
They understood not the motion of the eighth sphear from West to East, and so conceived the longitude of the Stars invariable.
1646, Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia EpidemicaNote
Pre-Copernican cosmology stacked these globes one inside another. Each carried its own heavenly body, and the eighth carried the fixed stars. Thomas Browne faults older astronomers for not understanding "the motion of the eighth sphear." Marlowe's "sooner shall the Sun fall from his Spheare" shows how the idea entered everyday rhetoric. Its lasting legacy is the phrase "the music of the spheres."
- 8To make something round or spherical; to bring it to perfection.
Skilled hands can sphere a lump of clay into a perfect ball.
The jeweler spheres each pearl until it gleams.
Similarround
Note
This verb shows up mostly in its past participle, used as an adjective. Tennyson's "sphered whole" pictures something made complete and rounded off. The figurative "to perfect" grows from the old sense of the sphere as the most perfect shape. Its literal "make round" use is the plainer one.
- 9To place something in a sphere, or among the celestial spheres; to enclose it within one.
The myth tells how the gods sphered the hero among the stars.
Poets would sphere the souls of the blessed within the turning heavens.
Note
A poet's verb, built on the old picture of the heavens. Shakespeare's sun is "enthroned and sphered" among the planets. Tennyson in 1850 asks the heavens to "sphere all your lights around, above." It is transitive and is now met almost only in verse. In modern prose, ensphere or simply "set among the stars" reads more naturally.
Less common meanings
- 10The edge of the heavens, imagined as a hollow globe within which the stars and planets appear to be set.
Early astronomers charted the stars as points fixed upon the great sphere.
Resistless rolls the illimitable sphere, / And one great circle forms the unmeasured year.
1791, Erasmus Darwin, The Economy of VegetationNote
Here the sky itself is pictured as a single hollow globe, and the bare phrase "the sphere" is now rare outside verse. Donne writes that Phoebus "equally lights all the Sphere," and Erasmus Darwin's "illimitable sphere" rolls on in 1791. Read in older poetry, the word often simply means the heavens. It names one enclosing vault, not the nested turning globes.
- 11The range of things to which a proposition, subject, or predicate applies; the whole set of cases it covers.
The sphere of the term 'metal' includes iron, copper, gold, and many others.
In point of fact, so often as we think a subject as partially included within the sphere of a predicate, eo ipso we think it as partially, that is, particularly, excluded therefrom.
a. 1856, William Hamilton, Lectures on Metaphysics and LogicSimilarscope, range, extension
Note
Older logic used this term for what is now usually called the extension of a concept: the class of all things a term covers. The phrasing "the sphere of a predicate" runs through William Hamilton and James Welton. It also appears in Meiklejohn's translation of Kant, where one proposition's sphere can exclude another's. In modern writing, prefer "extension" unless you are discussing these authors.
Showing meanings only.
Practice
Can you tell the meanings of sphere apart? Answer 3 quick questions from this page, or write your own sentence and AI will check it.
Origin
This word passed from Middle English 'spere', through Old French 'sphere' and Late Latin 'sphēra' (earlier Latin 'sphaera', meaning 'ball, globe, celestial sphere'), from Ancient Greek 'sphaîra' ('ball, globe'), whose ultimate origin is unknown.