space

The word “space” means the vast expanse beyond Earth's atmosphere where stars, planets, and other celestial bodies exist. In plain terms, room, distance, or the emptiness beyond Earth — literal or personal.

“Space” is pronounced spays (/speɪs/ in IPA).

Here is “space” used in a sentence: “Astronauts spend months living and working in space.”

Depending on how it is used, “space” can be a noun and a verb.

The word “space” comes from Latin. From Old French espace, from Latin spatium, from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning "to stretch." It gradually replaced the native Old English word "rum," which survives today as "room.".

“Space” is a very common word in modern English, usually learned at around the A2 level.

“Space” has 4 distinct senses listed in this dictionary. The most common is: the vast expanse beyond Earth's atmosphere where stars, planets, and other celestial bodies exist.

Space is the vast, near-empty expanse beyond Earth's atmosphere in which everything sits. The universe is the totality of that space plus all its contents — matter, energy, galaxies, and the laws governing them. In short, space is the arena; the universe is the arena and everything happening within it.

There's no sharp edge, since the atmosphere thins out gradually. By common convention, space begins at the Kármán line, about 100 kilometres (62 miles) above sea level, where the air is too thin for aircraft to fly and conventional flight gives way to orbital physics. Some agencies use 80 kilometres instead.

No — not in the ordinary way. Sound needs a medium such as air or water to travel through, and space is very nearly a vacuum. Without particles to carry the vibrations, sound cannot propagate, which is why space is often described as silent. Radio waves, being electromagnetic, do travel through it.

Almost, but not entirely. Space is the closest thing to a vacuum we know, yet it still holds sparse gas, dust, radiation, and stray particles drifting between stars and galaxies. Vast regions contain only a few atoms per cubic metre — extraordinarily empty by earthly standards, but never truly nothing.