- 1
The highest point something reaches — usually used for success, fame, or power (his career reached its zenith in the 1990s). It's a formal, almost literary word, more common in writing than in everyday talk. It originally came from astronomy, where the zenith is the exact point in the sky straight above your head.
頂點、巔峰
組成This word probably came into English through old astronomy books, tracing back to Arabic, though the exact path is a bit tangled and even language historians don't fully agree on it.
原始詞典資料3 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
zenithnoun/ˈzɛn.ɪθ/
- 1
astronomynatural-sciencesThe point in the sky vertically above a given position or observer; the point in the celestial sphere opposite the nadir.
- The 12 day wee had the wind high and large ſo that in two dayes ſaile we made the Sunne our Zenith or verticall point[…]
- In this 10th m. appeared that prodigious Comett the tayl whereof was like the blade of a double edged sword, and reached almost from the horizon to the zenith.
- 2
astronomynatural-sciencesThe highest point in the sky reached by a celestial body.
- […] in the middle of the day, when the sun was in the zenith, the violence of the heat was too great to stir out […]
- As far to the west as Monica could see, her world was a sea of fog, […]. Above it arched a cerulean sky; as the sun climbed to the zenith, […], the fog gradually took on a bluish tinge.
- 3
Highest point or state; peak.
- Winning the continental championship was the zenith of my career.
- I find my zenith doth depend upon / A most auspicious star.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。