# zenith

Pronunciation: US say "ZEE-nith" /ˈzi.nɪθ/; UK/AUS say "ZEN-ith" /ˈzɛn.ɪθ/

## Noun

1. The highest point or state that something reaches; its peak.
   - Simple: The highest or best point of something.
   - _At the zenith of its power, the empire stretched from the sea to the mountains._
   - _The band reached its zenith in the late 1970s and never quite matched it again._
2. The point in the sky directly above an observer, opposite the nadir; also, more loosely, the highest point in the sky that the sun or another celestial body reaches.
   - Simple: The point in the sky straight above you, or the highest point the sun, moon, or a star reaches.
   - _A column of smoke climbed from the horizon nearly to the zenith._
   - _The telescope was pointed straight at the zenith, where starlight passes through the least air._

## Origin

Arabic samt ar-raʔs ("the head's direction"), shortened to samt ("direction, path"), became Medieval Latin cenit and then Middle English cenyth. Some think the -ni- that replaced -m- came from someone misreading the three strokes. That is plausible, but it could simply be an approximation of the sound.

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