different between blem vs ylem

English

Etymology 1

Adjective

blem (comparative more blem, superlative most blem)

1. Abbreviation of blemished sometimes used on online auction sites

Noun

blem (plural blems)

1. (informal) A blemished item.
   • 1997, Michael I. Niman, People of the Rainbow: A Nomadic Utopia (page 6)

     They're all blems. They're from the dumpster behind an apple-waxing plant in Washington State.

Etymology 2

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): [bl?m]

Noun

blem (countable and uncountable, plural blems)

1. (MLE) A cigarette, spliff or another intoxicant preparation for smoking.

Etymology 3

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): [bl?m]

Verb

blem (third-person singular simple present blems, present participle blemming, simple past and past participle blemmed)

1. (slang, MLE, regional African-American Vernacular) Alternative form of blam (“to shoot”)

Anagrams

• Melb

English

Etymology

Resuscitation of Middle English ylem, from Medieval Latin h?lem, accusative of h?l? (“matter, the fundamental matter of all things; the matter of the body”) (whence English hyle), a transliteration of Ancient Greek ??? (húl?, “wood; material, substance; matter”). The concept of “fundamental matter” – Ancient Greek ????? ??? (pr?t? húl?) – was propounded by the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.).

The term ylem was first used in modern English in the paper “The Origin of Chemical Elements”, coauthored by Russian-American theoretical physicist and cosmologist George Gamow (1904–1968), American cosmologist Ralph Asher Alpher (1921–2007) and German-American nuclear physicist Hans Bethe (1906–2005), published 1 April 1948 in Physical Review. Alpher claimed to have found the word “in a large dictionary”, perhaps Webster’s New International Dictionary (2nd ed., 1934), which he referred to in a second 1948 paper (cited below). In a 1968 interview, Gamow also associated ylem with a Hebrew word he did not name; it remains unclear which word he was referring to.

The word ylem reappeared in popular books on science following the discovery in 1964–1965 of the cosmic microwave background, which had been predicted in 1948 by Alpher and Robert Herman (1914–1997), and again after the publication of images of the radiation composed from measurements by two satellites, the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) in 1992 and the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) in 2003.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /?i?l?m/
• Hyphenation: y?lem

Noun

ylem (uncountable)

1. (astronomy, cosmology, physics, now chiefly historical) In the Big Bang theory, the hot and dense plasma which made up the cosmos at the time of recombination in an early stage of its expansion and cooling, when the first atoms formed and photons decoupled. The ylem is regarded as the source of the cosmic microwave background. [from 1948.]
   • 1952, George Gamow, The Creation of the Universe, New York, N.Y.: Viking Press, OCLC 999160; republished as New York, N.Y.: Viking Press, 1961, 2nd edition, OCLC 642243549, page 53:

     Let us now consider the state of matter during the first minutes of the expansion process, when the temperature of the universe was many billions of degrees high. […] [T]he state of matter must be visualized as a hot gas formed entirely by nuclear particles; that is, protons, neutrons, and electrons. […] We will call this primordial mixture of nuclear particles "Ylem," [footnote: Pronounced: ??l?m] reviving an obsolete noun which, according to Webster's Dictionary, means "the first substance from which the elements were supposed to be formed." Next we can ask what happened to the Ylem when its density and temperature began to drop as the result of the rapid expansion taking place in the young universe.

References

Further reading

• ylem on Wikipedia.Wikipedia

Anagrams

• Emly, Lyme, elmy, lyme, myel-, yelm

Middle English

Noun

ylem (uncountable)

1. Alternative form of yle.