It helps pinpoint a point

Usage examples of ordinate.

Kyros disappeared from the great screen and was replaced by a grid on which each radiational component of the strange shell of energy was plotted on the ordinate against the abscissa of time.

She paced restlessly while he worked at making a graph with time as the abscissa and the code numbers for ordinates.

Such a line has for abscissa the distance of a load from one end of a girder, and for ordinate the bending moment or shear at any given section, or on any member, due to that load.

By the end of the day, the sand is crisscrossed with a mesh of ordinates, abscissas, curves to account for everything in nature.

I found that with each mixture there was a time of exposure which would produce the deepest blue, that with over-exposure the blue gradually turned gray, and that if a curve should be plotted, the abscissas of which should represent the time of exposure, and the ordinates of which should represent the intensity of the blue the curves drawn would have approximately an elliptical form, so that if one knew the exact time of exposure which would give the best result with any mixture, one might deviate two or three minutes either way from that time without producing a noticeable result.

I simply gave its co ordinates to my platoon sergeant and told him to have somebody check it.

I got down my old text for analytical geometry, from Thebes High School, measured some ordinates, abscissas, and slopes - plugged in the figures and wrote down the equation.

Waterhouse slashes an abscissa and an ordinate onto the board, then sweeps out a bell-shaped curve.