Here's a fun fact to ruin a perfectly good cliche for you. Meteors don't rise. They fall. So "meteoric rise" is, technically, a description of something doing the exact opposite of what it's named after. You've been using it wrong your whole life. So has everyone else. Congratulations, you're in excellent company.

Where "Meteoric" Actually Comes From

The Greek word behind it all is μετέωρος (meteoros), which means "raised or aloft." So far, so good. Things in the sky. When English borrowed it in the early 17th century, "meteoric" meant something close to that original sense: relating to elements of both the earth and the heavens. Celestial stuff. Poetry and theology loved it.

John Donne used it (spelled "Meteorique," because the 1600s were a wild time for spelling) in a letter written around 1612. That letter wasn't even published until 1651. So the word spent decades rattling around in private correspondence before it hit print. Very underground of Donne.

By the late 18th century, "meteoric" started meaning what you'd expect: actually relating to meteors and meteorites. The Pennsylvania Gazette used it in 1785. The word was finding its feet.

The Speedy Part Came Much Later

Here's where it gets interesting for word nerds. The sense you actually use "meteoric" for today, meaning fast and brilliant and sudden, is the youngest meaning of all.

Irish poet Thomas Dermody used it in the figurative flashing sense before his death in 1802, in an ode called "Cheerfulness." His work was published in "The Harp of Erin" in 1807. So he got there early. But the Oxford English Dictionary's earliest citation for the speedy sense is from the Daily Chronicle in London, dated January 16, 1895. Nearly a century after Dermody.

The phrase "meteoric rise" specifically shows up in Thomas B. Shaw's "The Student's Manual of English Literature" in 1864, where he compares Byron's literary career to the "meteoric rise and domination of the First Buonaparte." Shaw was clearly having fun with it. That combination of burning brightness and implied doom is doing real work in that sentence.

The Phrase That Never Took Off (or Down, as It Were)

If "meteoric rise" describes sudden success, logic suggests "meteoric fall" should describe sudden failure. And there's actually a published use of it: a 2009 article in American Entomologist titled "Ode to Alabama: The Meteoric Fall of a Once Extraordinarily Abundant Moth," about the decline of the moth Alabama argillacea.

Great title. Underused concept. Google's Ngram viewer shows "meteoric rise" absolutely dominates "meteoric fall" in printed usage. All eight standard dictionaries that track the phrase use "meteoric rise" as their example, not fall.

We collectively decided that meteors only go up. Despite all available evidence. Despite physics.

What This Means for You, the Word Person

Language is not logic. It's habit and history and the particular way a phrase sounds when you say it out loud. "Meteoric rise" sounds like something. It has weight and heat and speed in the vowels. "Meteoric fall" sounds like the title of a geology paper.

The meaning that stuck isn't the scientifically accurate one. It's the poetic one, the original one, the one that remembers μετέωρος: raised, aloft, between earth and heaven. The Greeks had the right instinct. We just bent the science a little to make the metaphor work.

If you've ever argued about whether a word "really" means what everyone uses it to mean: this is your evidence. Meteors fall. "Meteoric" means blazing upward. Language won.

Source: Grammarphobia