Affixes

The original sense of kosmos was order, but was applied to the world following the teaching of Pythagoras that its creation was orderly; so a cosmopolitan (Greek politēs, citizen) is a person familiar with many cultures and at ease with them. More recently the form has been applied to the whole universe: cosmology is the science of the origin and development of the universe; cosmogenesis refers to its origin; a cosmogony is a theory or myth about the birth of the universe. Cosmonaut derives from Russian kosmonaut, the Soviet equivalent of an astronaut; this has generated other words mainly used about the Soviet space programme, such as cosmodrome for a launching site for spacecraft.