supercell
supercell Lexical Profile
supercell Game Scores & Validity
• noun
A severe, long-lived thunderstorm characterized by a deep, persistently rotating updraft (mesocyclone), capable of producing large hail, damaging winds, and strong tornadoes.
"Meteorologists tracked the developing supercell across the Great Plains using Doppler radar."
In crystallography and computational physics, a composite periodic cell constructed from multiple adjacent unit cells of a crystal lattice, used to model crystal defects, impurities, or complex structures.
"The researchers used a 64-atom supercell to simulate the electronic properties of the doped semiconductor."
• Rhymes for supercell
• Nearby Words
Word Origin & Etymology
Coined in the early 1960s by British meteorologist Keith Browning, combining the prefix 'super-' with 'cell' (in its meteorological sense of a convective storm unit); the crystallographic sense emerged independently in the early 20th century.