Timepiece that indicates the daylight hours by the shadow that the gnomon casts on a calibrated dial

Usage examples of sundial.

As so often he wore his portable sundial strapped to his hip, a monstrously heavy bronze piece cast in Baghdad during the fifth Abbasid caliphate.

The double-shadowed sundial, the rose and the red grapes, the fraktur lettering.

Yes, the sundial was very old and had come from the monastery at Hawks Monkton when it had been destroyed in the sixteenth century.

Near them is one of the old-fashioned orangeries, with a great deal of wall and very little glass, and near it stands the sundial of Newtonian fame.

She watched the forest and the distant beach, the shadows of the scrub pines creeping over the sand, the oldest of sundials, marking the snaillike progress of the hours.

Socialism, soft drinks, soothsaying, sorcery, space travel, spectacles, spelling, sports, squirrels, steamboats, steel, stereopticans, the Stock Exchange, stomachs, stores, storms, stoves, streetcars, strikes, submarines, subways, suicide, sundials, sunstroke, superstition, surgery, surveying, sweat and syphilis!

Shadows cast by innumerable stone towers combed the dark blue water, all pointing in the same transitory direction, as if the stony pinnacles were gnomons to a half-thousand igneous sundials, tracking in unison the serene march of hours, of aeons.

The water rolled across the street, beginning to spread now, beginning to look more like water than that mind-boggling solid wall that had taken sundial, birdbath, and trees, but it still had power enough to sweep almost a dozen houses on the far side of Kansas Street off their foundations and into the Barrens.

He was the first person in Greece to make a sundial, a map of the known world and a celestial globe that showed the patterns of the constellations.

Newton was constructing a sundial on a south-facing wall, using, as gnomon, a slender rod with a ball on the end.

There is an odd little summer house which has been nearly buried in scarlet sumac and a grotesque sundial in the midst of what must once have been a garden.

The lowest form of wit notwithstanding, it's difficult to restrain an impulse toward sarcasm at a suggestion that people in terror, beset by earthquakes, hurricanes, totally enveloping darkness, and torrents of meteorites should be faulted for losing track of time and failing to check with their sundials and water clocks.

As Daniel noted while his horse toiled up the hill through the grasping spring mud, Isaac had already taken advantage of this south-facing wall by carving diverse sundials into it.

The flagship groaned with mysterious voices (and Truck, wrenched out of his head by mounting alien energies, hallucinated briefly a Roman sundial isolated by a single watery ray of light in a sunken garden, smelling mint, glycol, horsehair) as Pater hurled her up and out.

It seemed to take Spencer an age to turn, as if his body were a swingbridge powered by a hamster on a wheel, his arm the shadow on a sundial, rising imperceptibly each minute, the gun impossibly weighing the shadow down, until a lazy afternoon passes by and the gun is in place, the trigger finger, arthritic and torpid, crawls back towards the palm, the bullet leaves the barrel, wipes its eyes in the bright light, yawns, stretches, and wanders off lamely in the direction of Kohl's skull.