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Oct 12, 2005

This week's theme
Eponyms (words coined after people's names)

This week's words
benjamin
maxwellian
cereologist
Heath Robinson
vulcanian

Ceres from Emerita Augusta

Photo: Carlos Cabanillas

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cereologist

Cereologist (seer-ee-OL-uh-jist) noun

One who specializes in investigating crop circles.

Going by the countless varieties of cereals on the supermarket shelves, you'd think you have to be a cereologist to be able to select one. But it's not that. Rather, a cereologist is someone who studies crop circles, intricate circular patterns on crop fields.

The word is coined after Ceres, the goddess of agriculture in Roman mythology.

"'Some formations bear no trace of a human hand,' says cereologist and electrical engineer Colin Andrews, who's studied thousands of circles."
Victoria Marcinkowski; Crop Circles: Real or Hoax?; Science World (New York); Nov 18, 2002.

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