Etymology
From the prefix super- (borrowed from Latin over, above) + power.
Noun
superpower (countable and uncountable, plural superpowers)
- A sovereign state with dominant status on the globe and a very advanced military, especially the United States or formerly the Soviet Union.
- The United States has been a superpower for as long as anyone can remember.
- (fiction) An extraordinary physical or mental ability, especially possessed by a superhero or supervillain.
- Flight is a common superpower among superheroes such as Superman.
- Zorro is treated by many consumers of fictional media as a superhero despite his complete lack of superpowers.
- (mathematics) A tetration; a repeated exponentiation solved from right to left.
- 10^^3 in Knuth's up-arrow notation is sometimes called 10 to the superpower of 3, or 10^(10^10) or 10 tetrated to 3.
- I bet most kids who engage in a big number duel on the playground don't think to incorporate superpowers into their game! It sure beats using words that represent nonexistent numbers, like jillion, zillion and gazillion!
- Excessive or superior power.
Derived terms
- superpowerdom
- superpowerhood
Verb
superpower (third-person singular simple present superpowers, present participle superpowering, simple past and past participle superpowered)
- To give extraordinary powers to.
- Some people who aren't exactly computer-literate think I can superpower their old Gateway desktop from the late 1990s and make it run at lightning speed with a simple batch file; I'm just a programmer, I can't physically make a CPU faster.
Credits
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