Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Circumnavigate \Cir`cum*nav"i*gate\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Circumnavigated; p. pr. & vb. n. Circumnavigating.] [L. circumnavigatus, p. p. of circumnavigare to sail round; circum + navigare to navigate.] To sail completely round.
Having circumnavigated the whole earth.
--T. Fuller.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
1630s, from Latin circumnavigatus, past participle of circumnavigare "to sail round," from circum "around" (see circum-) + navigare (see navigation). Related: Circumnavigated; circumnavigating; circumnavigable.
Wiktionary
vb. 1 (context transitive English) To travel completely around somewhere or something, especially by sail. 2 (context transitive English) To circumvent or bypass.
WordNet
v. travel around, either by plane or ship; "We compassed the earth" [syn: compass]
Usage examples of "circumnavigate".
As for Hautbois, I presume it is because the Wizard often grants a child to those who circumnavigate the great river.
Bluff from the north, northeast, east, southeast, south--this they painted with never-tiring, Pecksniffian patience, boxing the compass around it as enthusiastically as that immortal architect circumnavigated Salisbury Cathedral.
Mercer knew that it formed a complete circle and that if he walked along it for five kilometres he would come right back to his starting point, having circumnavigated Rama.
Sir Francis Drake, too, embarked on his voyage for circumnavigating the globe, in 1577, with five vessels, of which the largest was of one hundred, and the smallest fifteen tons.
Despite their mastery of time and space, the Cocytans could only wait and watch, as frustrated as any snail seeking to circumnavigate a sequoia.
Brink had alluded to the possibility that they might have come down on an island, but without circumnavigating it they had no proof it was not part of a larger body of land.
In the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, European sailing ships discovered new continents (new, at any rate, to Europeans) and circumnavigated the planet.
Four hundred years before Eratosthenes, Africa had been circumnavigated by a Phoenician fleet in the employ of the Egyptian Pharaoh Necho.
Not only was it the time of Thales, Anaximander, Pythagoras and others in Ionia, but also the time of the Egyptian Pharaoh Necho who caused Africa to be circumnavigated, of Zoroaster in Persia, Confucius and Lao-tse in China, the Jewish prophets in Israel, Egypt and Babylon, and Gautama Buddha in India.
Was it possible, they wondered, that they were seeing the Milky Way and M31 from the other direction - like seeing the back of your head with light that has circumnavigated the universe?
A walkway circumnavigated the room, eight feet wide and without a rail.
We circumnavigated it, crawling on our stomachs next to the roots of the boxwood.
Once they were confident they had circumnavigated the city, they angled back toward the ocean until they found the southern road in.
Did n't ask him one word about what he had seen or heard, but gave him full details of my private history, I having never been off my own hearth-rug for more than an hour or two at a time, while he was circumnavigating and circumrailroading the globe.
Some of them are circumnavigating the planet while he is hitching his rocking chair about his hearth-rug.