VANE • DICCIONARIO INGLES.COM • Definition of Vane

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/veɪn/ Listen

noun

Vane n.

A contrivance attached to some elevated object for the purpose of showing which way the wind blows; a weathercock. It is usually a plate or strip of metal, or slip of wood, often cut into some fanciful form, and placed upon a perpendicular axis around which it moves freely. "Aye undiscreet, and changing as a vane."

Any flat, extended surface attached to an axis and moved by the wind; as, the vane of a windmill; hence, a similar fixture of any form moved in or by water, air, or other fluid; as, the vane of a screw propeller, a fan blower, an anemometer, etc.

(Zool.) The rhachis and web of a feather taken together.

One of the sights of a compass, quadrant, etc.

Vane of a leveling staff. (Surv.) Same as Target, 3.

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Etymology of 'Vane'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Vane" Quotes from Famous Books

... your taste. The most lovely women that I have ever seen have been small, bright, and perfect in their proportions. It is very rare that a tall woman has a perfect figure." Julie's own figure was quite perfect. "Do you remember Constance Vane? Nothing ever exceeded her beauty." Now Constance Vane—she, at least, who had in those days been Constance Vane, but who now was the stout mother of two or three children—had been a waxen doll of a girl, whom Harry had known, but had neither liked nor admired. ...

— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope

... Sir Harry Vane, who was a leading member of the House of Commons, and who had been governor of the colony of Massachusetts, feared that the country was in danger of falling into the hands of Cromwell as military dictator. He therefore urged the immediate passage ...

— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery

... pure Italian form, mainly called forth by public occasions. By the Elisabethans the sonnet had been used mainly in love poetry. In Milton's hands, said Wordsworth, "the thing became a trumpet." Some of his were addressed to political leaders, like Fairfax, Cromwell, and Sir Henry Vane; and of these the best is, perhaps, the sonnet written on the massacre of the Vaudois Protestants—"a collect in verse," it has been called—which has the fire of a Hebrew prophet invoking the divine wrath ...

— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... "thorough enigma" by the men, not one of whom had succeeded, even after the lapse of fourteen days, in arousing in her that which is most dear to the masculine soul, a preference—although it be a mild, a shamming or an evanescent preference—for one of them above another. Sir Vane Masham set her down over his third dinner's sherry as "an iceberg," in which kind opinion the little viscount joined, with the amendment of "polar refrigerator." Young Arthur French, who was very hard ...

— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various

... now and again, with an accompanying rippling patter of reef-points, betraying rather some subtle heave of the glassy sea than any sign that the breeze still lingered. Yet there must have been a light draught of air aloft, for the vane at our main-royal-masthead occasionally fluttered languidly out along the course we were steering, and our royals exhibited an occasional tendency to fill, albeit they as often collapsed again softly rustling to the masts. Moreover, the barque still retained ...

— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood

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