zero gravity

• zero-gravity

Coined by Austro-Hungarian-American artist Jack Binder in his 1938 picture feature "If Science Reached the Earth's Core", printed in the October 1938 issue of the science-fiction pulp-magazine Thrilling Wonder Stories as part of a series of similar "If—" articles.

zero gravity (uncountable)

1. The state of apparent weightlessness which occurs in a very low gravity field, or in free fall.
   • 1938 October, Binder, Jack, “If Science Reached the Earth's Core”, in Thrilling Wonder Stories, volume 12, number 2, page 99:

     Starting at the zero-gravity of earth's core, accumulative acceleration is easily built up in a four-thousand-mile tube.

• microgravity
• weightlessness
• zero g, zero-g
• zero G, zero-G
• zero gee, zero-gee

• “zero gravity” in Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction, Oxford University Press, 2007, →ISBN.
• zero-gravity n. at the OED Science Fiction Citations Project