Trending: apogee

Lookups spiked 2,900% on July 20, 2021

Why are people looking up apogee?

Apogee was among our top lookups on July 20th, 2021, after many accounts of Jeff Bezos’s spaceflight used the word.

What does apogee mean?

We define apogee as “the point in the orbit of an object (such as a satellite) orbiting the earth that is at the greatest distance from the center of the earth,” and also as “the point farthest from a planet or a satellite (such as the moon) reached by an object orbiting it.” The word is often contrasted with perigee, which is defined as “the point in the orbit of an object (such as a satellite) orbiting the earth that is nearest to the center of the earth” and “the point nearest a planet or a satellite (such as the moon) reached by an object orbiting it.”

What is notable about this use of apogee?

Apogee has an additional figurative meaning, which is “the farthest or highest point, the culmination.”

Bezos' political involvement reached a new apogee in 2019 during the re-election bid of Seattle's socialist city councilwoman, Kshama Sawant, who called Bezos "our enemy" and tried to pass a head tax to fund housing for those displaced by Amazon's Seattle footprint. Amazon spent $1.5 million against Sawant and other progressive candidates, a record at the local level, with more than a dozen of the company's executives contributing to Sawant's opponent. (Sawant won re-election anyway.)
— Branko Marcetic, In These Times (Chicago, IL), 2020 Mar.

Trend Watch is a data-driven report on words people are looking up at much higher search rates than normal. While most trends can be traced back to the news or popular culture, our focus is on the lookup data rather than the events themselves.


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