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Comment by DiggyJohnson | Hacker News Reader

As others have said, there are a few celestial terms that come to mind:

  - azimuth
  - zenith
  - nadir

Also some chemistry terms, again just from top of brain, might be wrong:

  - alchemy
  - elixir
  - arsenic
  - alkali

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Nadir always seemed very obviously Arabic to me. Weirdly, I first encountered it in a book on category theory, and only after that did I start to hear it used in everyday English to mean the opposite of 'apex'.

It's the opposite of zenith, another word ultimately derived from Arabic.

The difference between an apex and a zenith is that an apex exists as a point in space, while a zenith is a direction, with no fixed point which may be said to be "the" zenith. There are other differences given that apex has a few related meanings, but this is the main one.

Ah, yes. I knew it wasn’t quite the right word.

Sofa!

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