EQUATOR • DICCIONARIO INGLES.COM • Definition of Equator

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/ɪkwˈeɪtər/ Listen

noun

Equator n.

(Geog.) The imaginary great circle on the earth's surface, everywhere equally distant from the two poles, and dividing the earth's surface into two hemispheres.

(Astron.) The great circle of the celestial sphere, coincident with the plane of the earth's equator; so called because when the sun is in it, the days and nights are of equal length; hence called also the equinoctial, and on maps, globes, etc., the equinoctial line.

Equator of the sun or Equator of a planet (Astron.), the great circle whose plane passes through through the center of the body, and is perpendicular to its axis of revolution.

Magnetic equator. See Aclinic.

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Etymology of 'Equator'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Equator" Quotes from Famous Books

... wings, and some days afterwards was crossing the equator. She was never known again as a free trader. The captain and mate had both "made their piles," and after arriving at the Atlantic states retired from sea. Pardon G. Simpkins took up his residence in Boston, and during the late war with Mexico, was very prominent in his denunciations ...

— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage

... to believe that this quiet backwater was within an hour or two of the trenches. G.H.Q. was indeed situated well back behind "the Front," which, however precise the maps in the newspapers may affect to make it, is, like the Equator of our school-books, a more or less "imaginary line drawn across the earth's surface." Imaginary because if a line be, as we were taught with painful reiteration, length without breadth, then "the Front" is not a line at all, much less a straight ...

— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan

... gesture. "Florida be hanged! What he wants is to sell his group. That would set him up quicker than sitting on the equator." ...

— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton

... face, the color of it was really not so dark as one might expect from a man not at all careful of it, and living within nine or ten degrees of the equator. My beard I had once suffered to grow till it was about a quarter of a yard long; but, as I had both scissors and razors sufficient, I had cut it pretty short, except what grew on my upper lip, which I had trimmed into a large pair of Mahometan whiskers, ...

— McGuffey's Fourth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey

... as one may call it, of the Encantadas, that which exalts them in desolation above Idumea and the Pole, is, that to them change never comes; neither the change of seasons nor of sorrows. Cut by the Equator, they know not autumn, and they know not spring; while already reduced to the lees of fire, ruin itself can work little more upon them. The showers refresh the deserts; but in these isles, rain never falls. Like split Syrian gourds left withering in the sun, they are cracked by ...

— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville

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