Here are 1094 terms from WordNet with definitions and synonyms and narrower terms. It started as an 8000 word subset that is apparently for datacentric terms ie quantifiable numerically or as enumerated sets. It was prearranged according to topic, so I kept in astronomy, math, units, physics, geometry and some geophysical terms and deleted chemistry, medicine, psychological, and semantic terms. I also did edit some of the definitions a touch, mostly to remove example sentences that I thought detracted from the definitions.
Each word is followed by a number which indicates which homonym in
Wordnet is meant here. The definition comes after the "|". So, this is
nice to have definitions present although they are not the best one
could do. These terms and their definitions are at the level of what
you need to read an science article in a major newspaper or something
like it.
Most of these words are useful for science in general. Words that are
strictly for astronomy usually have "(astronomy)" in the defintion.
Sometimes this list has more than one homonym. EG
day 0 twenty-four_hours 0 twenty-four_hour_period 0 -hour_interval 0 solar_day 0 mean_solar_day 0 | time for Earth to make a complete rotation on its axis; "two days later they left"; "they put on two performances every day"; "there are , passengers per day" day 7 | the period of time taken by a particular planet (e.g. Mars) to make a complete rotation on its axis; "how long is a day on Jupiter?"
second 0 | 1/60 of a minute; the basic unit of time adopted under the
Systeme International d'Unites
second 1 | following the first in an ordering or series; "he came in a
close second"