the fixed year of the ancient Egyptians, 365 days 6 hours long, beginning with the appearance of the star Sirius on the eastern horizon at dawn, which heralded the yearly flooding of the Nile. A Sothic cycle contained 1460 such years
Sothic year in American English
noun
the fixed year of the ancient Egyptians, determined by the heliacal rising of Sirius, and equivalent to 365 days
Word origin
[1820–30; soth(is) + -ic]This word is first recorded in the period 1820–30. Other words that entered Englishat around the same time include: boomerang, exogenous, insider, karma, morphology-ic is a suffix forming adjectives from other parts of speech, occurring originally inGreek and Latin loanwords (metallic; poetic; archaic; public) and, on this model, used as an adjective-forming suffix with the particular senses“having some characteristics of” (opposed to the simple attributive use of the basenoun) (balletic; sophomoric); “in the style of” (Byronic; Miltonic); “pertaining to a family of peoples or languages” (Finnic; Semitic; Turkic)