Zenith Zenith The zenith is an imaginary point directly "above" a particular location, on the imaginary celestial sphere. "Above" means in the vertical direction opposite to the apparent gravitational force at that location. The opposite direction, i.e. the direction in which gravity pulls, is toward the nadir. The zenith is the "highest" point on the celestial sphere. The word "zenith" derives from an inaccurate reading of the Arabic expression (), meaning "direction of the head" or "path above the head", by Medieval Latin scribes in the Middle Ages (during the 14th century), possibly through Old Spanish. It was reduced to 'samt'
Opposite (semantics) has no word that stands in opposition to it (hence the unanswerability of "What is the opposite of platypus?"). Other words are opposable but have an accidental gap in a given language's lexicon. For example, the word "devout" lacks a lexical opposite, but it is fairly easy to conceptualize a parameter of devoutness where "devout" lies at the positive pole with a missing member at the negative pole. Opposites of such words can nevertheless sometimes be formed with the prefixes "un-" or "non-", with varying degrees of naturalness. For example, the word "undevout" appears in Webster's dictionary of 1828, while