Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A constellation in the Northern Hemisphere near Lacerta and Lyra, containing the star Deneb.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The typical genus of the subfamily Cygninæ, formerly conterminous with it, but now including all the white swans, or even restricted to those which have a tubercle on the bill, as the mute swan of Europe, Cygnus olor.
  • noun An ancient northern constellation representing a bird called a swan by Ovid and others, and now always so considered.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun (Astron.) A constellation of the northern hemisphere east of, or following, Lyra; the Swan.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • proper noun A taxonomic genus within the subfamily Anserinaeswans.
  • proper noun astronomy : A summer constellation of the northern sky, said to resemble a swan. It includes the triple star system HD 188753 and the stars Deneb and Albireo.
  • proper noun Greek mythology : A king of the Ligurians and relative of Phaeton who was transformed into a swan and placed in the sky as a constellation.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a genus of Anatidae
  • noun a constellation in the northern hemisphere between Pegasus and Draco in the Milky Way; contains a black hole

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Latin cygnus, swan; see cygnet.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Latin cygnus ("swan"), from Ancient Greek κύκνος (kyknos, "swan")

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Latin cygnus ("swan"), from Ancient Greek κύκνος (kyknos, "swan")

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Examples

  • The original film was about the crew of the Palomino, a rather bland group of futuristic Earth astronauts who stumble upon a long-lost ship called the Cygnus, which is captained by none other than a raving mad

    IGN Movies 2009

  • The 1979 original focused on a ship on a deep space mission and its encounter with a lost vessel called the Cygnus, home to a lone scientist in charge of an army of robots (including the hulking red killer Maximilian) who turn out to be the ship's missing crew.

    EXCLUSIVE: Joseph Kosinski’s ‘Black Hole’ To Begin Script Work Soon, Will Preserve Maximilian, Cygnus And More » MTV Movies Blog 2010

  • I'd call Cygnus hang-glider. :p The last page, I guess it is Orion but something doesn't make sense about it.

    Kid's Astronomy: Celestial Birds Migrate West? | Universe Today 2009

  • Little ones, the kind that form when a single star collapses, have indeed been found: in 1974, British cosmologist Stephen Hawking bet physicist Kip Thorne of the California Institute of Technology a one-year subscription to Penthouse that the collapsed star called Cygnus X-1 would not turn out to be a black hole.

    Shedding Light On A Black Hole 2008

  • The name Cygnus itself is the Latin form of the original Greek word, Κύκνος (

    Conservapedia - Recent changes [en] DanielPulido 2010

  • To any space scientist the Cygnus was a dream fulfilled.

    The Black Hole Foster, Alan Dean 1979

  • The Cygnus was the Great Pyramid of our time and Reinhardt its Cheops.

    The Black Hole Foster, Alan Dean 1979

  • Building and crewing the Cygnus was a helluva achievement, one of mankind's proudest moments.

    The Black Hole Foster, Alan Dean 1979

  • Recently, light left by passing cosmic rays has been tracked back to a hollow space in a nebula called Cygnus X where many new stars are born, reports a study published in Science.

    CBC | Top Stories News 2011

  • Normal piloting rolls can be made to land the characters 'ship on the Cygnus, which is massive.

    UncleBear 2009

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