flying saucer
15
5.6
- noun
- /ˈflaɪɪŋ ˈsɔːsər/
- Archaic
:
platillo volante
- The couple said they had been pursued by a flying saucer while traveling in their Chevrolet Bel-Air.
His thoughts were that that it was a real flying saucer that was in our possession.
- His thoughts were that that it was a real flying saucer that was in our possession.
- And it says and identifies itself as a computer on board a flying saucer from the future.
- But for example, it's been known that in one sighting they saw flying saucers in the sky.
- So they make a press announcement to the whole world that they recovered a flying saucer.
- He he he lays out how and this is might be something you can find Steve on how the actual layout of the flying saucer UFO that we're all aware of.
- But in any case, I had certainly not thought about flying saucers in years.
Examples
-
Is the Pentagon hiding evidence that we have been visited by flying saucers?
Academic text (1995) -
Matt, have you ever seen a flying saucer?
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Now, just to be clear, what we saw was a flying saucer.
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Ladies and gentlemen, this is a flying saucer.
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What makes you so sure there are no flying saucers?
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So you folks who called in to say you saw a flying saucer land--
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We found a flying saucer!
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The media people are obviously hoping it's a real live flying saucer.
Fiction book (2000) -
For 60 years, they believed in flying saucers without proof, and now we've got proof.
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A moment later, the light winked out, and the flying saucer slid away into the night.
Synonyms
186
4.4
An object in the sky that people cannot identify, often thought to come from other planets
5
5.7
A flying object seen in the sky whose origin is not known and often thought to be from space
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning is directly compositional: 'flying' (moving through the air) + 'saucer' (a round, flat dish) yields a round, disc-shaped object that flies, which a B1 learner can readily infer. Cross-linguistic equivalents (e.g. French soucoupe volante, Spanish platillo volante) and the straightforward image of a 'saucer' in the air make the expression semantically transparent, even if cultural knowledge links it to extraterrestrial spacecraft.
Etymology
Flying saucer comes from a 1947 sighting when a pilot said the strange, round objects moved 'like a saucer' skipping across water, and newspapers called them flying saucers. That's why flying saucer now means a round object seen in the sky, often thought to be a 'spacecraft' from another planet.