phoe⋅nix
[fee-niks] 
[fee-nahy-sis, -nee-] for 2. | 1. | (sometimes initial capital letter ) a mythical bird of great beauty fabled to live 500 or 600 years in the Arabian wilderness, to burn itself on a funeral pyre, and to rise from its ashes in the freshness of youth and live through another cycle of years: often an emblem of immortality or of reborn idealism or hope. |
| 2. | (initial capital letter) Astronomy. a southern constellation between Hydrus and Sculptor. |
| 3. | a person or thing of peerless beauty or excellence; paragon. |
| 4. | a person or thing that has become renewed or restored after suffering calamity or apparent annihilation. |
bef. 900; < L < Gk phoînix a mythical bird, purple-red color, Phoenician, date palm; r. ME, OE fēnix < ML; L as above
Phoe⋅nix
[fee-niks] | 1. | Classical Mythology.
|
| 2. | a city in and the capital of Arizona, in the central part. 764,911. |
| 3. | Military. a 13-ft. (4 m), 989-lb. (445 kg), U.S. Navy air-to-air missile with radar guidance and a range of over 120 nautical mi. |
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2009.
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| phoe·nix also phe·nix (fē'nĭks) n.
[Middle English fenix, from Old English from Old French, both from Medieval Latin fēnix, from Latin phoenix, from Greek phoinix.] |
| Phoenix The capital and largest city of Arizona, in the south-central part of the state northwest of Tucson. Settled c. 1868, it became territorial capital in 1889 and state capital in 1912. The city is noted as a winter and health resort. Population: 1,510,000. |
Copyright © 2009 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
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phoenix [(fee-niks)]
A mythical bird that periodically burned itself to death and emerged from the ashes as a new phoenix. According to most stories, the rebirth of the phoenix happened every five hundred years. Only one phoenix lived at a time.
Note: To “rise like a phoenix from the ashes” is to overcome a seemingly insurmountable setback.
Copyright © 2005 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
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phoenix
Ðone wudu weardaþ wundrum fægerFig. sense of "that which rises from the ashes of what was destroyed" is attested from 1591.
fugel feþrum se is fenix hatan
["Phoenix," c.900]
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Phoenix operating system
An operating system, built in BCPL on top of IBM MVT and later MVS by Cambridge University Computing Service from 1973 to 1995, which ran on the university central mainframe. All parts of the system were named after birds, including Eagle (the job scheduler, also the nearest pub), Pigeon (the mailer), GCAL (the text processor) and Wren (the command language), leading to Wren Libraries (a local pun).
Phoenix was much used by chemists in daytime and by the rest of the university in the evenings, and was only abandoned in favour of Unix in 1995; it is one reason Cambridge made little contribution to Unix until then.
Computing Service Phoenix closure memo
(2003-12-05)
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