Crossword clues for sundial
sundial
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Sundial \Sun"di`al\, n. An instrument to show the time of day by means of the shadow of a gnomon, or style, on a plate.
Sundial shell (Zo["o]l.), any shell of the genus Solarium. See Solarium.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
Wiktionary
n. A simple timekeeping device in which the shadow cast by a vertical pole or plate (the gnomon) is used to indicate the time of day.
WordNet
n. timepiece that indicates the daylight hours by the shadow that the gnomon casts on a calibrated dial
Wikipedia
A sundial is a device that tells the time of day by the apparent position of the Sun in the sky. In the narrowest sense of the word it consists of a flat plate (the dial) and a gnomon which casts a shadow onto the dial. As the sun appears to move across the sky, the shadow aligns with different hour-lines which are marked on the dial to indicate the time of day. The style is the time-telling edge of the gnomon, though a single point or nodus may be used. The gnomon casts a broad shadow; the shadow of the style shows the time. The gnomon may be a rod, a wire or an elaborately decorated metal casting. The style must be parallel to the axis of the Earth's rotation for the sundial to be accurate throughout the year. The style's angle from horizontal is equal to the sundial's geographical latitude.
In a broader sense a sundial is any device that uses the sun's altitude or azimuth (or both) to show the time. In addition to their time-telling function, sundials are valued as decorative objects, as literary metaphors and as objects of mathematical study.
It is common for inexpensive mass-produced decorative sundials to have incorrectly aligned gnomons and hour-lines, which cannot be adjusted to tell correct time.
Sundial or sun dial may refer to:
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Sundial, a timekeeping devic
- Analemmatic sundial, showing more than just the time of day
- Digital sundial, with digital display
- History of sundials
- Scottish sundial, decorative sundials of the renaissance period
- Kirkdale sundial, Saxon sundial
- Whitehurst & Son sundial (1812), very accurate sundial
- Carefree sundial, very large sundial in Arizona
- Sundial, Boy With Spider, Indianapolis Museum of Art
- Sundial Bridge at Turtle Bay, bridge in Redding, California
- List of sundial mottos
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.