PRECESSION • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Precession

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/prisˈɛʃən/ Listen

Precession

noun

The motion of a spinning body (as a top) in which it wobbles so that the axis of rotation sweeps out a cone.

The act of preceding in time or order or rank (as in a ceremony). Synonyms: precedence, precedency.

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Etymology of 'Precession'

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precession of the equinoxes

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"Precession" Quotes from Famous Books

... as a basis of subsequent star-catalogues.[1] The Ptolemaic catalogue embraces only those stars which were visible at Rhodes in the time of Hipparchus (c. 150 B.C.), the results being corrected for precession "by increasing the longitudes by 2 deg. 40', and leaving the latitudes undisturbed" (Francis Baily, Mem. R.A.S., 1843). The names and orientation of the constellations therein adopted are, with but few exceptions, identical with those ...

— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various

... Indians are tomahawking Hirams and Jonathans and Jonases at Fort William Henry; all the dead people who have been in the dust so long—even to the stout-armed cook that made the pastry—are alive again; the planet unwinds a hundred of its luminous coils, and the precession of the equinoxes is retraced on the dial of heaven! And all this for a bit ...

— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... wearisome to read the record. Yet it is the chronicle of Christendom during one of the most important and fateful epochs of modern history. No man can thoroughly understand the complication and precession of phenomena attending the disastrous dawn of the renewed war, on an even more awful scale than the original conflict in the Netherlands, without studying the correspondence of Barneveld. The history of Europe is there. ...

— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... on to say that the Greeks "imparted their scientific view of the Universe to the East. They became the teachers of the East in astronomy as in medicine and other sciences, and the credit of having discovered the law of the precession of the equinoxes belongs to Hipparchus, the Greek astronomer, who announced this important theory about the year 130 B.C."[346] Undoubtedly the Greeks contributed to the advancement of the science of astronomy, with which, ...

— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie