n. 1. Roman Mythology The goddess of love and beauty. 2. The second planet from the sun, having an average radius of 6,052 kilometers (3,761 miles), a mass 0.82 times that of Earth, and a sidereal period of revolution about the sun of 224.7 days at a mean distance of approximately 108.2 million kilometers (67.2 million miles). [Middle English, from Old English, from Latin, love, Venus; see wen-1 in the Appendix of Indo-European roots.] (click for a larger image) Venusfalse-color image produced from radar images taken by the Magellan probe |
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition copyright ©2022 by HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved.