Definition of "Leonid"

I wrote my first story about the ghost of a horse leaping from a cascade of flame just after the leonids had been more torrential than men had remembered them for centuries.

1974, Guy Davenport, Tatlin!

Night of your birth. Thirty-three. The Leonids they were called. God how the stars did fall. I looked for blackness, holes in the heavens. The Dipper stove.

1985, Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian […]

I was surprised by […] the unusually tall windows, […] through which long telescopes were once turned on eclipses of the sun and the moon, on the intersections of the orbits of the stars with the line of the meridian, on the Leonid meteorite showers and the long-tailed comets flying through space.

2001, WG Sebald, translated by Anthea Bell, Austerlitz, Penguin, published 2011, page 141