Search the Dictionary

One of two great circles intersecting at right angles in the poles of the equator. One of them passes through the equinoctial points, and hence is denominated the equinoctial colure; the other intersects the equator at the distance of 90º from the former, and is called the solstitial colure. Thrice the equinoctial line…

A circle; a continent. [Obs.] The tryne compas [the threefold world containing earth, sea, and heaven. Skeat.] Chaucer. Azimuth compass. See under Azimuth. -- Beam compass. See under Beam. -- Compass card, the eircular card attached to the needles of a mariner's compass, on which are marked the thirty-two points or r…

An instrument for describing circles, measuring figures, etc., consisting of two, or (rarely) more, pointed branches, or legs, usually joined at the top by a rivet on which they move.

hotographs. F. Galton. -- Composite sailing (Naut.), a combination of parallel and great circle sailing. -- Composite ship, one with a wooden casing and iron frame.

Having a common center, as circles of different size, one within another. Concentric circles upon the surface of the water. Sir I. Newton. Concentrical rings like those of an onion. Arbuthnot.

described by a straight line always passing through that vertical point; a solid having a circle for its base and tapering to a point or vertex.

ane. The conic sections are the parabola, ellipse, and hyperbola. The right lines and the circle which result from certain positions of the plane are sometimes, though not generally included. -- Conic sections, that branch of geometry which treats of the parabola, ellipse, and hyperbola. -- Conical pendulum. See Pend…

ts of a body; existence; firmness; coherence; solidity. Water, being divided, maketh many circles, till it restore itself to the natural consistence. Bacon. We are as water, weak, and of no consistence. Jer. Taylor. The same form, substance, and consistency. T. Burned.

To organic cohesion of different circled in a flower; adnation.

A children's game in which one player is inclosed by a circle of others holding a rope.

A circle, usually colored, seen in peculiar states of the atmosphere around and close to a luminous body, as the sun or moon.

Resembling, or situated like, a crown or circlet; as, the coronary arteries and veins of the heart.

A set or circle of persons who meet familiarly, as for social, literary, or other purposes; a clique. "The queen of your coterie." Thackeray.

a crown; as, the paper is stamped with a crown. Crown of aberration (Astron.), a spurious circle around the true circle of the sun. -- Crown antler (Zoöl.), the topmost branch or tine of an antler; also, an antler having a cuplike top, with tines springing from the rim. -- Crown bar, one of the bars which support the…

s imagined to exist between the region of the fixed stars and the primum mobile (or outer circle of the heavens, which by its motion was supposed to carry round all those within it), in order to explain certain movements of the heavently bodies. -- Crystalline lens (Anat.), the capsular lenslike body in the eye, servi…

A suborder of Bryozoa, usually having a circle of bristles below the tentacles.

xpresses the amount of curvature of a curve. -- Chord of curvature. See under Chord. -- Circle of curvature. See Osculating circle of a curve, under Circle. -- Curvature of the spine (Med.), an abnormal curving of the spine, especially in a lateral direction. -- Radius of curvature, the radius of the circle of curv…

An imaginary circle or orbit in the heavens; one of the celestial spheres. Milton.

Of or pertaining to a cycle or circle; moving in cycles; as, cyclical time. Coleridge. Cyclic chorus, the chorus which performed the songs and dances of the dithyrambic odes at Athens, dancing round the altar of Bacchus in a circle. -- Cyclic poets, certain epic poets who followed Homer, and wrote merely on the Trojan…

A combining form meaning circular, of a circle or wheel.