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Glite Dictionary
🏯 A famous wall 🌌 A galaxy structure
Great Wall

Great Wall

1 9.9
A huge group of galaxies that looks like a long wall in space
  • proper noun
  • Specialized
translation icon : Gran Muralla de galaxias
  • So here's here's the the two the two Sloan Great Wall and the Great Wall of Geller and Hooker.
  • Great Wall of galaxies

Examples

  • From suffering poverty and hunger to exporting food and technology, from hand-building the Great Wall to launching rockets into space, from riding bicycles to driving motorcars, whatever you can think of, it is impossible to call it a success.

    Blog text (20)

  • The Coma cluster is, in fact, the largest concentration of galaxies on the Great Wall.

    Academic text (2002)

  • Dubbed the "Great Wall," it is one of the largest structures known in the universe.

    Academic text (1992)

  • The parquet floor, the great wall panels, the allegorical ceiling dangling its chandeliers: all must be erected and connected, suffusing and refracting golden light.

    Fiction book (1995)

  • This region of sky contains part of what is called the "Great Wall"—a roughly linear concentration of galaxies that stretches across the cosmos for perhaps a billion light-years.

    Academic text (2002)

  • The Sloan Great Wall is an astonishingly massive arrangement of galaxies that spans over 1.37 billion light-years.

  • Astronomers study the Great Wall to understand the large-scale structure of the universe and the formation of galaxies.

  • The discovery of the Great Wall challenged previous notions of galaxy distribution in the cosmos.

Surface Forms

Great Wall main

Morphology

great + wall

The astronomical sense is a straightforward extension of 'great' (very large/significant) + 'wall' (a dividing or vertical structure): it names a very large, wall-like arrangement of galaxies. This compositional, metaphorical but literalizable meaning is directly inferable by a B1 learner who knows both constituents and follows common noun-adjective composition patterns.

Etymology

Great Wall in astronomy is a name for a very large, wall-like line of galaxies. Scientists used Great for its huge size and Wall because the galaxies form a long, flat 'wall', so the name helps you imagine this enormous structure in space.