outer space

1. 1.

   any location outside the Earth's atmosphere

   “the astronauts walked in outer space without a tether”

   “the first major milestone in space exploration was in 1957, when the USSR's Sputnik 1 orbited the Earth”

   Synonymsspace

   Broaderspacelocation

   Part ofaerospace

   Partsinterplanetary spaceinterstellar spaceintergalactic spacedeep space

Questions about outer space

What does outer space mean?

outer space means "any location outside the Earth's atmosphere".

What is another word for outer space?

Close synonyms include space. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is outer space a common word?

outer space is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.