what is meteors?

Those soft chewy things in with the Lucky Charms cerial.

Meteors are the light you see when a meteoroid heats up in the Earth's atmosphere - NOT the meteoroid itself!

Unicorns flying in the sky

Little tiny meteoroids that burn up in the atmosphere. Meteorites are ones that make it to the ground.

A meteor is a meteoroid or a particle broken off an asteroid or comet orbiting the Sun that burns up as it enters the Earth's atmosphere. Meteoroids that reach the Earth's surface without disintegrating are called meteorites.
Meteors are mostly pieces of comet dust no larger than a grain of rice. Meteorites are principally rocks broken off asteroids in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and can weigh as much as 60 tones.

A Meteor is ANYTHING that falls through the atmosphere----(its why weather men are called Meteorologists) We have LITHO meteors--Small rocks that fall from outer space and their are HYDRO Meteors (Rain drops and snow flakes) for example. A meteorite is a meteor that has fallen to the ground--especially a Litho meteor.

If you want to talk fancy, you could call a Rainstorm "Hydro meteoric Precipitation". be careful and don't get hit by hydrometeors! Getting hit by a Lithometeor would be more painful.

Meteors are anything coming from outer space and falling on Earth. However, when their masses reach a certain degree (big objects) they are called by their names: they could be asteroids or comets.
Meteors come from various sources: the result of asteroids colliding and thus generating small pieces of rock or what have you, or wandering small objects that are finally attracted by the Earths gravity....etc.
Once they hit our planet, their names change to "Meteorites".

It's a piece of material left over from the formation of the Solar System (normally ejected from a cometary tail), entering the Earth's atmosphere and compressing it until it becomes ionised and starts to glow - the air, not the meteor. Typical size of a meteor is the size of a grain of sand. Typcial burnup height is 80km.

If they reach the ground they are meteorites and in space they are meteoroids.