Wind power

The seventeenth entry is o atlas do vento, and the word that carries it is younger and stranger than it looks. It is not a Greek technical term. Before 1595 no collection of maps was called an atlas; the name belonged to the figure of myth who holds up the sky, and it reached the bookshops because the geographer Gerardus Mercator chose it as the title of a collection of maps that appeared in 1595, the year after he died. Other publishers copied the title, and within a century the word had stopped being a name and become the ordinary English noun for a bound set of maps. The same picture put it into anatomy, where the atlas is the topmost vertebra of the neck, because it carries the head as the figure carries the sky. So this entry means exactly what it says: a book of maps of the wind, which is what a developer opens before anybody has visited the site. Portuguese has the word and the history too, and the single place the two languages part is the plural. Os atlas does not change; English adds a syllable and writes « atlases ».