UFO
- 1Initialism of unidentified flying object.
Several pilots reported a fast-moving UFO near the airfield that evening.
Reports of UFOs surged across the region during that summer.
Note
The letters stand for a deliberately neutral phrase: anything in the air that resists ready explanation, especially something that looks like a discrete object comparable to an aircraft. The alien-spacecraft reading is the colloquial drift, and ufology is the field that grew up around it. UAP is the alternative label. The article is a, not an: a UFO, because each letter is spoken.
- 2A craft or needlework project, especially in knitting, that has been started but not yet completed.
Like a novel you began with great enthusiasm but abandoned with a bookmark stuck halfway through.
Every serious knitter seems to keep a basket of UFOs waiting for attention.
She finally turned that neglected UFO into a finished baby blanket.
Note
Crafters use this shorthand in contrast with WIP, its more hopeful cousin. A WIP is a project you are still actively working on. A UFO has stalled and may never be finished, as Kerry Wills explains in The Close-knit Circle (2007). It shares only its letters with the flying-object sense. It belongs to the relaxed talk of knitting circles and craft blogs.
- 3Initialism of ultrared flattened object.
The catalog listed dozens of UFOs detected in the infrared survey.
Each UFO appeared only in the longest-wavelength images.
Note
An astronomer's term that has nothing to do with the flying-object sense beyond its letters. Ultrared is a dated word for infrared. These are faint, extremely red, elongated sources picked out in infrared imaging of deep fields, and they are generally interpreted as distant, dust-reddened galaxies. In technical writing, spell out the full phrase at first use so readers do not reach for the familiar meaning.
Use it in a sentence
Write your own sentence with UFO, and AI will tell you whether it fits and which meaning you used.