Cosmos

Greek "kosmos" meant order and adornment, and Pythagoras is credited with applying it to the orderly universe. The adornment sense survives, oddly, in "cosmetic," while the order sense stands directly against "chaos."

  1. noun · /KOZ-moss/

    The universe regarded as an ordered, harmonious whole.

    The universe under the aspect of order — reality as a system, not a heap.

    Ancient astronomers assumed a cosmos — a lawful, patterned heaven — long before they could prove the orbits.

    The ordered counterpart to chaos, and what entropy slowly unwinds; the same root, surprisingly, gives us cosmetics.